Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle

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Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle is the 23rd Pokémon movie, the only one released during Pokémon Journeys: The Series, and the most recent Pokémon anime feature film – its successor, Pokémon: Wild Card, was announced in August 2026 for release from 2027. Known in Japan simply as Pocket Monsters the Movie: Koko (ココ), after its young hero, it closes the loose trilogy that began with I Choose You! and continued with The Power of Us: the parallel world in which Ash travels alone with Pikachu and has never met Brock or Misty. This time he wanders into the jungle around Milyfa Town and meets Koko, a boy raised from infancy by a lone Zarude who left its troop to care for him, and who has grown up believing that he is a Pokémon too. It is a Tarzan story, a Mowgli story, and above all a story about what it means to be somebody’s father.

Tetsuo Yajima returned to direct after The Power of Us and co-wrote the screenplay with series veteran Atsuhiro Tomioka, with Kunihiko Yuyama again supervising the animation, which went back to traditional 2D after the all-CGI Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution. The film introduced the Mythical Pokémon Zarude – revealed to the world on Pokémon Day 2020 as the trailer unveiled Koko’s adoptive parent – and brought back a Shiny Celebi as the forest’s silent guardian. Its soundtrack is unusual too: every song in the Japanese version was written by one artist, Taiiku Okazaki.

Release around the world

The film was announced on 10 January 2020 for release on 10 July 2020, and then the pandemic arrived. Advance-ticket sales were postponed in April, the release itself was postponed indefinitely on 13 May, a winter date was promised in June, and on 5 August 2020 the new date was set: Friday 25 December 2020. It is the only Pokémon movie ever to open outside July in Japan, and it opened into a country heading back into a state of emergency, at number two behind the all-conquering Demon Slayer: Mugen Train. Abroad, the cinema runs were limited to China (10 September 2021), South Korea (15 September 2021) and Taiwan (10 December 2021); everywhere else The Pokémon Company International followed the Mewtwo model and released the film worldwide on Netflix on 8 October 2021, in the middle of Pokémon’s 25th-anniversary year, with no Fathom Events screenings and no television premiere.

Japan’s DVD and Blu-ray came out on 14 July 2021. Shock Entertainment released Australian discs on 11 May 2022, Polyband a German Blu-ray on 29 April 2022, and Viz Media the US DVD and Blu-ray on 18 October 2022; there has been no UK release on disc. TV Tokyo gave it its Japanese television premiere on 18 November 2022, the day Pokémon Scarlet and Violet went on sale.

There was no Pikachu short, and – unlike every film before it – no established television theme over the opening: the Japanese version opens on Beverly’s Koko, the English on Cyn’s Always Safe.

Chronology in relation to the anime
In Japan the film opened on 25 December 2020, between To Train, or Not to Train! (JN049, 11 December) and A Pinch of This, a Pinch of That! (JN050, 8 January 2021) in Pokémon Journeys; the Friday slot in between went to the television premiere of Mewtwo Strikes Back – Evolution, and release day itself to a Christmas repeat. On television Ash was based at the Cerise Laboratory in Vermilion City with Goh, climbing the World Coronation Series rankings with Pikachu, Dragonite, Gengar and Galarian Farfetch’d among his team. The film has nothing to do with any of that. Like I Choose You! and The Power of Us, it is set in the parallel world of the 2017 film, where Ash wears his redesigned cap, travels alone and has only Pikachu with him; the region that holds Milyfa Town and the Forest of Okoya is never named, and the TV special Distant Blue Sky! (2022) later returned to the same world. English-speaking viewers met the film on Netflix on 8 October 2021, a month after Pokémon Master Journeys began streaming there.

Secrets of the Jungle is broken down into the following parts

• Pokémon the Movie: Secrets of the Jungle – the main feature, 100 minutes, opening on Beverly’s Koko in Japan and Cyn’s Always Safe in English, the first Pokémon movie not to open with a television theme
• No Pikachu short – Japanese audiences saw only trailers before the feature, and the Netflix release has none

Story

A child in the river

Deep in the Forest of Okoya a troop of Zarude lives around a colossal tree whose spring water heals any wound, and sings the Song of Zarude: the forest is theirs, outsiders are forbidden, and they take what they need from the other Pokémon. One Zarude, out alone, hears crying from the river and finds a human baby adrift in a cradle. It searches for the parents and finds only a burnt-out car and the ruin of a laboratory. Unable to abandon the child, it breaks the troop’s law, leaves the great tree and raises the boy itself, wrapping him in a torn strip of pink cloth. It calls him Koko. He calls it Dada.

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Ash arrives in the jungle

Ten years later Ash Ketchum phones his mother from Milyfa Town and sets off into the jungle with Pikachu, where a wild Cramorant promptly swallows Pikachu whole – its Gulp Missile ability in action – before spitting him out again. A Flapple leads them a merry dance, and they fall in with Sharon and a survey team from the Biotope Company, a research firm studying the forest’s healing springs. Team Rocket, watching from the undergrowth, look up the company and its director, Doctor Zed, on James’s tablet and decide that the quickest route to something worth stealing for Giovanni is to get themselves hired.

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Koko and Dada

Koko, now about ten, runs on all fours, swings on vines and speaks the language of Pokémon. He and Dada spend their days tidying up after the troop’s raids, gathering the seeds of the Berries the Zarude have scattered and planting them in a secret garden of their own. When a Hoothoot brings news of a fight between a Flygon and a Pangoro, Koko separates them and carries the injured Flygon into Zarude territory to use the healing spring – where a troop Zarude catches him and Dada has to apologise and take him home. The scolding that follows turns into the argument that has been coming for years: Koko cannot use moves, does not look like Dada, and wants to know whether he is a Zarude at all. He storms off through the trees, swings straight into a pipe the Biotope Company has run through the forest, and drops, unconscious, into the river.

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Milyfa Town

Ash pulls the boy out of the water below a waterfall and carries him to the Pokémon Center in Milyfa Town, where Koko wakes in a panic and bolts into the streets. Ash catches up with him just in time to watch him talk a rampaging Drednaw out of its temper – Koko can speak with Pokémon, and clearly thinks he is one, having never seen another human in his life. The two spend the day together: Koko tries clothes and human food, watches people and their Pokémon side by side, and begins to copy everything Ash does. That evening a troop of Falinks is clearing people away from the fireworks site, and Koko talks to them too, freeing their leader from the firework tube it has got stuck in. The grateful mayor explains that the display honours Celebi, which is said to visit the town in times of peace and leave behind “an egg from the future”. Watching a mother and daughter at the fireworks, Koko decides that Ash should meet his parent.

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The truth

Koko leads Ash and Pikachu to Dada, who binds the intruders in vines on sight. Koko demands the truth, and Dada gives it: he is a human. It takes them to the ruined laboratory where it found him and hands over the pendant he wore as a baby and an old photograph of an infant with his parents. At the great tree the troop’s Elder tells Dada that Celebi has not been seen since the day the baby came to the forest, and fears something terrible is coming. That night Ash passes on something his own father once told him – a dream lives in your heart, and it comes true if you never give up – and Koko, encouraged, searches the ruin and finds a wallet bearing the Biotope Company’s logo. The next morning Ash takes him to the company’s headquarters, where Doctor Zed, visibly shaken, explains that Koko’s parents were Dr. Chrom and Dr. Phossa Molybdenum, the company’s founders and his own colleagues, that they died in a car crash ten years ago, and that their missing baby was named Al. Sharon scans the pendant: it holds corrupted research data and an image of the great tree. Zed presses the boy to lead him there so that he can finish his parents’ work, and when Koko runs back to the jungle in distress he carries a tracking chip on his shoulder that he knows nothing about.

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The Heart Tree

Zed follows the signal with a convoy of trucks and an enormous spider-legged machine. Ash and Pikachu, lost in pursuit of Koko, are guided back by a Skwovet he befriended, only for all four of them to be bound in String Shot by Zed’s Ariados and locked in a truck – a truck that Team Rocket, now in company uniform, promptly hijack to steal Pikachu. Then the Cramorant coughs up the data drive it swallowed from them earlier, and what is on it changes their minds: they let the prisoners go. At the great tree Zed fires anchoring missiles into the trunk and the healing water gushes out, but he announces that the water was never the point; the tree itself is the source, and he means to take it. When his own staff object he throws one of them out of the machine and carries on. Back at the office Team Rocket find Zed’s video log and the whole truth: ten years ago, when the Molybdenums found the tree and chose to stop their research out of respect for the Zarude who worshipped it, Zed ran their car off the road into a fireball, took their water sample and left them to die – never knowing that they had set their baby adrift in a cradle with their research hidden in his pendant.

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Jungle Healing

Ash, Pikachu and Koko reach the tree and throw themselves at the machine; the Zarude troop joins them under its Alpha, and it is still not enough. Then Dada arrives, hurt, at the head of an army of jungle Pokémon it has recruited by going from one to the next, apologising for the troop’s years of selfishness and begging for help to save its son. The battle that follows is long and brutal, and Zed rants throughout that he will prove the Molybdenums wrong. Shielding Koko from the machine, Dada is struck down. The Elder tells Koko to carry it to the spring, but the wounded tree’s water no longer heals, and as Dada fades it understands at last what being a father means – having something you want to protect more than yourself. Koko will not let go. Drawing on the jungle’s power, he uses Jungle Healing himself – the first human in the anime ever to use a Pokémon move – and Dada opens its eyes. The machine’s ejected pilot remembers that its control unit is on its back; the Zarude and the jungle Pokémon lift Pikachu up to it, Iron Tail does the rest, and Zed, fleeing along a fallen tree above the river and still insisting he was right, is snared by a vine as he jumps.

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A bridge between two worlds

The Biotope Company’s staff, the jungle Pokémon and the Zarude troop repair the forest together, and Ash phones his mother again, just to talk. Team Rocket, in disguise, watch a news report of Officer Jenny arresting Doctor Zed on the strength of his own recorded confession – leaked, for once, by them. Ash says his goodbyes, but Koko has made a decision: he wants to see the world and be a bridge between people and Pokémon. He fetches his bag from Dada’s nest, catches up with Ash, trips, and spills a bagful of Berries from the secret garden – Dada’s parting gift. The Zarude send him on his way by turning the healing spring into a geyser, and Koko bounds off into his future as both human and Zarude. Later, at the great tree, Dada looks up to see that the Shiny Celebi has come back to the forest. Over the credits Japan hears Kaela Kimura’s Tadaima to Okaeri and sees the winning pictures from a children’s drawing contest; the English version plays Cyn’s No Matter What. There is no scene after them.

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Major Characters

Koko (Moka Kamishiraishi / Kimlinh Tran) is a boy of about ten, raised in the Forest of Okoya by a Zarude and convinced he is one; he runs on all fours, speaks to Pokémon as easily as Ash speaks to people, wears a strip of pink cloth and a pendant from the cradle he was found in, and turns out to be Al Molybdenum, the son of the Biotope Company’s founders. In the film’s climax he becomes the first human in the anime to use a Pokémon move. Dada (Tōchan; Nakamura Kankurō / Edward Bosco) is the Zarude that found him: a loner who broke the troop’s law to raise a human child, recognisable by the torn pink cape it wears – the “Dada” form of Zarude that later appeared in the games – and voiced in Japanese, in his first anime role, by the kabuki star Nakamura Kankurō VI, who said he cried all the way through the script.
Ash Ketchum (Satoshi) is once again the I Choose You! Ash, alone with Pikachu, and once again happy to be the supporting player in someone else’s story; this is, remarkably, the first time in the anime that Ash himself speaks about his father. Doctor Zed (Kōichi Yamadera / Billy Kametz) is the director of the Biotope Company and the most unambiguous villain the movies have produced – a man who murdered his colleagues for their discovery and will tear down a forest to prove them wrong – voiced in Japanese by Yamadera in his 23rd consecutive Pokémon film. Sharon (Karen; Shōko Nakagawa / Michelle Ruff) is his assistant, who leads the field team Ash meets and scans Koko’s pendant, and Dr. Chrom and Dr. Phossa Molybdenum are Koko’s parents, seen in a photograph and in Zed’s confession.

The Zarude troop – the Elder (Hiroshi Naka / Kellen Goff), the Alpha (Kenjirō Tsuda / Ryan Andes) and the Sub-Alpha (KENN / Major Attaway) – guard the great tree and sing its rules, and the Shiny Celebi, the forest’s other Mythical Pokémon, is less a character than a barometer: absent for the ten years since the baby arrived, back when the forest is at peace. This is the only Pokémon movie without a single Legendary Pokémon in it.

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Other Characters & Pokémon Debuts

Jessie, James and Meowth infiltrate the Biotope Company as employees, lose their stolen data to a Cramorant, hijack the wrong truck, and end up – for once – on the right side, freeing Ash and Koko and leaking Doctor Zed’s confession to the police. The mayor of Milyfa Town (Kenichi Ogata / Marc Thompson) explains the Celebi fireworks, Delia Ketchum takes two phone calls from her son, Nurse Joy and Officer Jenny do their jobs, and a mother and daughter at the fireworks give Koko his first glimpse of what a parent looks like. Rita and Phil from New Pokémon Snap can be spotted photographing Milyfa Town – and, in return, Rita’s photographs of the town’s Pokémon Center, the great tree and the Biotope Company building hang in Professor Mirror’s laboratory in the game.

The jungle itself supplies the rest of the cast: the Cramorant that swallows Pikachu (and later Team Rocket’s data drive), the Skwovet that befriends Koko and guides Ash, the Flygon Koko rescues, the Falinks at the fireworks, the Drednaw in the town square, and the Hoothoot, Nuzleaf, Whimsicott, Pangoro, Mudsdale and dozens of others that answer Dada’s call at the end. Not one of Ash’s television companions or rivals appears.

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Pokémon making their anime debut in the film

As the first film made during the Galar era, Secrets of the Jungle introduces a whole crowd of Generation VIII Pokémon to the anime – twenty in all, led by the Mythical Zarude. Had the film opened in July 2020 as planned it would also have been the first appearance of Cinderace and Greedent, both of which reached the TV series first during the delay.

• Zarude#893 · the Rogue Monkey Pokémon
• Cramorant#845 · swallows Pikachu
• Arrokuda#846 · in Cramorant’s beak
• Flapple#841
• Falinks#870 · at the fireworks
• Gossifleur#829
• Eldegoss#830
• Rillaboom#812
• Inteleon#818
• Dubwool#832 · the mayor’s
• Boltund#836
• Blipbug#824
• Dottler#825
• Impidimp#859
• Thievul#828
• Galarian Stunfisk#618 · Galarian form
• Perrserker#863
• Hattrem#857
• Alcremie#869
• Galarian Ponyta#077 · Galarian form

Cast

The voice cast of both the Japanese and English versions. Japan’s guest stars were actress Moka Kamishiraishi (Koko), kabuki actor Nakamura Kankurō VI in his first anime role (Dada), Kōichi Yamadera in his 23rd Pokémon film running (Doctor Zed) and Shōko Nakagawa in her 13th (Sharon), with Kenyu Horiuchi taking over the narration after the death of Unshō Ishizuka. The English dub, directed by Lisa Ortiz, was unusual in splitting its cast between The Pokémon Company’s New York regulars and a Los Angeles cast recorded at Iyuno – Kimlinh Tran, Edward Bosco, Michelle Ruff and the late Billy Kametz among them.

Character	English voice actor	Japanese voice actor
Ash Ketchum (Satoshi)	Sarah Natochenny	Rica Matsumoto
Pikachu	Ikue Ōtani	Ikue Ōtani
Koko	Kimlinh Tran	Moka Kamishiraishi
Dada (Tōchan)	Edward Bosco	Nakamura Kankurō
Doctor Zed	Billy Kametz	Kōichi Yamadera
Sharon (Karen)	Michelle Ruff	Shōko Nakagawa
Dr. Chrom Molybdenum	Kaiji Tang	Tokuyoshi Kawashima
Dr. Phossa Molybdenum (Rin)	Lisa Ortiz	Arisa Sekine
Elder Zarude	Kellen Goff	Hiroshi Naka
Alpha Zarude	Ryan Andes	Kenjirō Tsuda
Sub-Alpha Zarude	Major Attaway	KENN
Mayor of Milyfa Town	Marc Thompson	Kenichi Ogata
Delia Ketchum (Hanako)	Sarah Natochenny	Masami Toyoshima
Nurse Joy (Joy)	Megan Hollingshead	–
Cramorant	Marc Thompson	Rikako Aikawa
Skwovet	Michele Knotz	Kei Shindō
Jessie (Musashi)	Michele Knotz	Megumi Hayashibara
James (Kojirō)	Carter Cathcart	Shin-ichirō Miki
Meowth (Nyarth)	Carter Cathcart	Inuko Inuyama
Wobbuffet (Sonans)	Erica Schroeder	Yūji Ueda
Narrator	Rodger Parsons	Kenyu Horiuchi

Trailer

The official English trailer for Secrets of the Jungle, released on 7 September 2021 ahead of the Netflix premiere.

The Japanese Pokémon Day 2020 trailer that revealed Zarude as Koko’s adoptive parent, from the official Pokémon YouTube channel in Japan.

Trading Cards

The Japanese cards of the film are two of the oddest in the game. Swallowed Up Pikachu (105/S-P) – Pikachu wedged in a Cramorant’s beak, exactly as in the film’s opening – came in a 7-Eleven-exclusive advance-ticket set from 7 August 2020, together with a Celebi coin and booster packs from Legendary Heartbeat, the expansion that had been timed for the film’s original July date. Koko (106/S-P), the cinema gift for the first three million attendees from 25 December 2020, is one of only a handful of cards in the game’s history to depict a human as a Pokémon: a Grass-type with 90 HP and an attack called Tarzan Kick, illustrated by the film’s own director, Tetsuo Yajima. A Supporter card, Plump Musician (119/S-P), came with the limited edition of the Koko theme-song CD, and Korean cinema-goers in September 2021 received Korean printings of Swallowed Up Pikachu, Koko and Zarude V.

None of these was ever printed in English; Netflix viewers got no card at all. The English tie-in is limited to the Zarude and Shiny Celebi cards of Vivid Voltage (November 2020), the Western release of Legendary Heartbeat, where Celebi became one of the first Amazing Rares. Everything is catalogued in our Trading Card Game section.

• Swallowed Up Pikachu105/S-P · 7-Eleven advance-ticket set, 7 August 2020
• Koko106/S-P · cinema gift, 25 December 2020 · illustrated by Tetsuo Yajima
• Plump Musician119/S-P · with the Koko Theme Song Collection, 23 December 2020
• Zarude VVivid Voltage 22/185 · Legendary Heartbeat 013/076 in Japan
• CelebiVivid Voltage 9/185, Amazing Rare · Legendary Heartbeat 009/076 in Japan

Movie Ads & Posters

Posters and home-video artwork for Secrets of the Jungle – the January 2020 teaser visual, the Japanese poster in all its versions as the release date slipped from “10 July” to “coming soon” to “this winter” to Christmas Day, the key visual, both English posters used by Netflix and Viz, the logos, the character artwork, and the Australian DVD and Blu-ray. The Japanese and Viz Media covers and any magazine adverts are still wanted.

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Trivia & Facts

• The pandemic made this film a collection of “onlys”: the only Pokémon movie postponed from its announced Japanese date, the only one released outside July, the first winter release in the series’ history – and, with ¥2.02 billion taken during a state of emergency, the lowest-grossing of the lot, just below Volcanion. It is also the only Pokémon movie with no Legendary Pokémon in it at all; Zarude and Celebi are both Mythical.
• Koko’s Jungle Healing makes him the first human in Pokémon animation to use a Pokémon move. The film is the first in which Ash himself talks about his father (only Delia had mentioned him before, in Pokémon Emergency! and I Choose You!), and it tips its hat to The Kangaskhan Kid (EP034), the 1997 episode about Tommy, the boy raised by Kangaskhan. The Koko promo card’s attack is called Tarzan Kick.
  

  

• Every song in the Japanese version – six of them – was written and composed by Taiiku Okazaki, a first for the series: Beverly’s opening Koko (arranged by Hiroyuki Sawano, and the first movie opening never used by the TV show), the Zarude’s Rule Song with lyrics by the director and vocals by Okazaki and the band SiM, Show Window for the Milyfa Town montage, a children’s choir for The Hum of the Forest, Tortoise Matsumoto’s main theme Fushigi na Fushigi na Ikimono, and Kaela Kimura’s ending Tadaima to Okaeri. The English dub replaces almost all of them with Cyn’s Always Safe and No Matter What and Ben Dixon’s My New Friends, and re-records the Song of Zarude with its own cast.
• The game tie-ins were a Shiny “Okoya Forest” Celebi and a “Jungle” Zarude for Sword and Shield, by serial code with Japanese advance tickets from 7 August 2020, and a level 70 Dada Zarude – cape and all – for everyone who saw the film from 25 December. Western players got Jungle Zarude through the Pokémon Trainer Club newsletter from November 2020 and Dada Zarude with the Shiny Celebi for signing up before the Netflix premiere. Pokémon GO ran a Secrets of the Jungle event twice, in December 2020 with an Explorer Pikachu and a Shiny Celebi research line, and in October 2021 for Zarude’s debut; in Pokémon Masters EX it is while chasing this film’s Shiny Celebi that Team Rocket end up on Pasio.
  

  

• Yajima hid a theme in the names: Okoya is an anagram of oyako – parent and child – and Milyfa an anagram of “family”; Koko’s parents are Chrom and Phossa Molybdenum, three chemical elements, and his real name Al makes a fourth; Zed is simply Z. Hiroshi Fujiwara’s fragment design studio created the Biotope Company and Doctor Zed logos seen in the film, and the Zarude’s dialogue is simply translated for the audience – to the other humans in the film they sound like any other Pokémon.
• Had the film kept its July 2020 date it would have been the anime debut of Cinderace and Greedent, both of which turned up in the TV series first while it waited; Cinderace’s Pyro Ball is still in the finished film. Rita and Phil from New Pokémon Snap appear in Milyfa Town, and Rita’s photographs of the town appear in the game. A three-chapter prequel manga, Secrets of the Jungle – Another Beginning by Teruaki Mizuno, set three years before the film, was serialised in CoroCoro and published in English by Viz in February 2022.
  

  

• The Netflix release on 8 October 2021 was the first worldwide simultaneous premiere of a Pokémon movie, timed for the franchise’s 25th anniversary, and the English dub was the only one ever recorded at Iyuno, with a Los Angeles cast alongside the New York regulars. Billy Kametz, the English Doctor Zed, died in June 2022. The Japanese closing narration says outright that humans and Pokémon need not share blood to be family; the dub softens it, and leaves out the children’s drawings that run through the Japanese credits.

Errors

• The vine that snares Doctor Zed as he tries to jump from the fallen tree disappears when the camera cuts to a wider shot.
• The Cherrim in the forest are in their Sunshine Form during the rain, when they should be in their Overcast Form.
• The English credits misspell the name of composer Mason Lieberman as “Leiberman”.

Reviews & Reception

The numbers tell the story of the year it came out in. Secrets of the Jungle opened in Japan on 25 December 2020 at number two behind Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, with 320,000 admissions and ¥378 million over its first three days, passed a million admissions in January – the same month Japan went back into a state of emergency – and finished on ¥2.02 billion, the lowest total of any Pokémon movie and seventeenth among Japanese films of 2021. The cinema runs in China (around $3.4 million in its opening weekend) and South Korea ($1.65 million) in the autumn of 2021 lifted the worldwide figure to roughly $23.6 million, and Japanese audiences liked it a good deal more than the box office suggests: it averages 3.9 out of 5 on Filmarks from more than nine thousand ratings.

With no cinema release in the West and a quiet arrival on Netflix in October 2021, the film drew few mainstream reviews – Rotten Tomatoes has only two and no Tomatometer score, and Metacritic none at all – but those who did review it were warm. Anime News Network’s Callum May gave it a B, rated the animation A+, and said he could happily have watched a whole series about Koko and Dada, though he found the villain cartoonish and the Celebi tie-in forced; Common Sense Media’s Jennifer Borget gave it three stars and praised its beautiful 2D animation and easy-to-grasp message; CGMagazine called it strong on narrative but tepid on plot. Dogasu’s Backpack, which compares every dub with its original, thought this one got a great deal right – and the replaced songs unacceptable.

Fans responded to the father-and-son story, to OLM’s hand-drawn animation and to Zarude’s design, and the climax at the tree is widely counted among the series’ most moving; the complaints were the familiar ones – a predictable, FernGully-style villain, a CG mecha that sits awkwardly in a 2D film, Ash pushed to the sidelines, a Celebi with little to do – plus, for dub viewers, the loss of Okazaki’s songs. On home video it reached Japan on 14 July 2021, Germany in April 2022, Australia in May 2022 and the US via Viz Media on 18 October 2022, and it remains on Netflix. It will not be the last: in August 2026 The Pokémon Company announced Pokémon: Wild Card, a new animated film about the Trading Card Game, due from 2027.

Scores at a glance (as of October 2026)

• IMDb – 6.4/10 user rating
• Rotten Tomatoes – No Tomatometer (2 critic reviews) · 59% audience score“A positive, visually-delightful film” – Jennifer Borget, Common Sense Media
• Letterboxd – 3.1/5 average from 11,000+ ratings
• Common Sense Media – 3/5 stars · recommended for ages 8+
• Anime News Network – B overall (animation A+, art A)“I genuinely could have watched a whole series about this” – Callum May