filmreroll

Pokemon The First Movie, Part 1

Added 2019-06-19 08:31:09 +0000 UTC

It's funny how little I know of where the story is going. Pokemon: The First Movie is essentially the story of an emotionally fragile lonely god, toying with strangers. Our protagonists would seem to have very little agency in it. Even though in the movie they end up having an effect on Mewtwo, it's almost by accident that they convince him of the value of humanity. Aiming to capture that in a mechanic, or having hope of knowing how to make a story work out of that as a central struggle seems like a fool's errand. That's when you just leap out into the void and trust that you'll find an interesting story in there, it's just not the story you expect.

To pull back the curtain a bit, I try never to pre-prep stories, but understanding the movie and anticipating likely turns is definitely part of my job, and I felt that a pretty likely outcome was one in which the protagonists never end up on Mewtwo's island. In that scenario, the storm roils over the world without end, and in that case, the story became rather than a small drama contained on an island, an epic travelogue, with our heroes on the road trying to out-run or out-last the ten plagues of Mewtwo as the world slowly succumbs to his power. The heroes would have no idea where this storm came from or why it was wreaking its havoc. This story appealed to me as a bit different than anything we've done on the reroll, and it avoided the faulknerian struggles of Mewtwo, which I was worried would be difficult to turn into good radio. Of course, in the end we didn't do any of that. But you'll just have to listen for yourselves.