Pokémon Movie: The Rise of Darkrai

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Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai, or as its Japanese title directly translates, Pocket Monsters Diamond & Pearl the Movie: Dialga vs. Palkia vs. Darkrai, is the tenth movie in the Pokémon franchise and the first movie of Generation IV and the Pokémon Diamond and Pearl series.

Like all of its predecessors this film was directed by Kunihiko Yuyama, and it is also the second movie to feature the new English voice cast – though the first to be recorded by DuArt Film & Video, who would dub every Pokémon movie from here to the end of the XY era.

The film’s initial release came when it arrived in Japanese theatres on 14 July 2007. The next release came in the USA when it was broadcast on Cartoon Network on 24 February 2008. Later that year, on 29 September, it made it to the UK on DVD and followed in Australia on 5 November. Later broadcasts include a showing on Jetix UK in February 2009; Jetix Spain did a showing on 6 September 2008, Mexican network Open Signal aired the movie on 13 May 2009 and Panda Biggs of Portugal aired it on Christmas Day 2010.

The main Legendaries featured in this movie are given away a little by the translated Japanese title: Dialga, Palkia and of course Darkrai – the Mythical Pokémon of nightmares, making its anime debut here along with no fewer than eighteen other Sinnoh Pokémon.

The Diamond and Pearl trilogy

Unlike the other Pokémon movies before it, The Rise of Darkrai is the first movie in the franchise to have a direct sequel; it is in fact part of a trilogy known as the Diamond and Pearl trilogy, which comprises The Rise of Darkrai, Giratina and the Sky Warrior, and finally Arceus and the Jewel of Life.

In the DVD version of The Rise of Darkrai a little teaser was actually included at the end for Giratina and the Sky Warrior; said teaser featured Regigigas appearing from beneath the earth’s surface. This was the only proper teaser trailer to be included with a Pokémon movie (as opposed to just a flash of a movie’s name and expected release date) since Pokémon the Movie 3: The Spell of the Unown.

Chronology in relation to the anime
In Japan the film opened on 14 July 2007, between Steamboat Willies! (DP039, 5 July) and Top-Down Training! (DP040, 19 July), a third of the way into the first Diamond and Pearl season. Ash, Dawn and Brock are on the long road from Eterna City to Veilstone: Ash holds two Sinnoh badges (the Coal Badge from Roark and the Forest Badge from Gardenia) and travels with Pikachu, Aipom, Turtwig and Staravia; Dawn has one Contest Ribbon, from Floaroma Town, and a team of Piplup, Buneary, Pachirisu and Buizel – still hers at this point, several months before the trade that sent Buizel to Ash; Brock has Sudowoodo, Croagunk and the Happiny that hatched from his Egg in the spring. Chimchar is here too, but as Alice’s partner rather than Ash’s, who would not meet his own until the autumn. In the dub, Cartoon Network premiered the film on 24 February 2008, three weeks after the Season 10 finale and six weeks before Battle Dimension began.

The Rise of Darkrai is a single feature

• Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai – the main feature, 90 minutes; no Pikachu short was produced for the 2007 season

Story

Dialga versus Palkia

The film opens in a dimension beyond our own, where Dialga, master of time, and Palkia, master of space, have blundered into each other and begun a battle neither can win. Their Roar of Time and Spacial Rend tear at the fabric between worlds, and in the quiet town of Alamos a young scientist named Tonio watches his instruments register disturbances in space-time that should not be possible.

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Alamos Town

Ash, Dawn and Brock are heading for a Pokémon Contest in Alamos Town, a city built on an island in a lake and crowned by the twin Space-Time Towers, when they are given a lift across the water in a hot-air balloon by Alice, a local tour guide, and her Chimchar. In town they meet three strong Trainers in town for the Contest – Maury with his Torterra, Kai with his Empoleon and Allegra with her Infernape – and get a battle or two in before Alice shows them the sights.

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The garden and the Baron

Alice takes everyone to the garden laid out by Godey, the architect of the towers, where wild Pokémon live alongside the town’s. The gang’s Pokémon are let out to play, a squabble over Pecha Berries is settled by the tune Alice plays on a leaf, and then a Gallade comes running with bad news: part of the garden has been twisted out of shape, its pillars bent as though space itself had been folded. Baron Alberto, a pompous local aristocrat with a Lickilicky and designs on Alice, declares that Darkrai is to blame and orders a Hyper Beam at the nearest shadow – which turns out to be Tonio. Tonio, for his part, has a far more alarming theory: time and space are coming apart.

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Nightmares

Darkrai does appear – a hovering, white-maned shadow that speaks in a hoarse whisper and keeps repeating the same warning: “Don’t come here.” It puts Ash to sleep with Dark Void, and in his nightmare he is chased through a lightless Alamos by Darkrai itself. He wakes at the Pokémon Center to Tonio reading from the diary of his great-grandfather Godey, which holds a photograph of Godey with Alice’s grandmother Alicia. In flashback we see the young Alicia stumble on Darkrai in the garden, surrounded by Pokémon suffering from its nightmares, and soothe them all with the very same leaf melody Alice still plays.

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The Space-Time Towers

Tonio shows the group around the Space-Time Towers – two spires joined at the top, one for time and one for space, which Godey built as a vast musical instrument. At their summit is a machine that plays enormous discs across the whole town, and among them is a piece called Oración, a melody Godey wrote to calm any Pokémon that heard it. Ash and Dawn’s Pokémon race each other up the spiral staircases, and when the machine plays, the whole of Alamos stops to dance.

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Palkia comes through

That night Palkia bursts into the real world through a rip in the sky, badly hurt, and hides itself – and the whole of Alamos Town with it – inside a pocket of warped space. Darkrai tries to drive it off and the town, led by Alberto, assumes Darkrai is the attacker. In the fighting that follows Darkrai’s Dark Void puts half the town’s Pokémon to sleep, and the Baron, caught in the crossfire of a nightmare, wakes up as a Lickilicky. Then the nightmares start leaking into the waking world: Pokémon that were asleep begin to appear in the streets, buildings double and blur, and a wall of fog closes in around the town’s edges. Beyond it there is nothing at all.

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A town out of time

Tonio works out the truth from Godey’s diary: it was Darkrai, not any human hero, who saved Alicia all those years ago, and the distortions were never its doing but Palkia’s. Before the townspeople can be persuaded, Dialga follows Palkia through the rift, and the two Legendaries resume their battle in the skies over Alamos. Every clash of Roar of Time and Spacial Rend erases another slice of the town, and when an attack is aimed at Alice, Darkrai throws itself in the way to shield her. Only then does Alice understand that Darkrai has mistaken her for her grandmother – and she, Ash and Dawn finally see it for what it is.

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Oración

With Alamos dissolving around them, Tonio remembers Godey’s note that Oración could soothe even the fiercest Pokémon. The group recover the right disc and race for the top of the towers in Alice’s balloon, powered aloft by Chimchar’s flames, while the Legendaries’ attacks blow the basket apart beneath them; Ash catches Dawn’s hand as she falls, and the two of them climb the rest of the way with Aipom and Turtwig while Brock gets the townspeople to safety. Darkrai, back on its feet, wraps Dialga and Palkia in a sphere of shadow to buy time – and is struck down by both of them together, fading into nothing as the final Roar of Time and Spacial Rend are charged.

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Dawn over Alamos

At the summit the Oración disc will not fit the machine until Ash spots the empty slot at its centre, and with the power gone Pikachu and Pachirisu charge it by hand. The melody rolls out over the ruined town, golden wings of light unfold from the towers, and Dialga and Palkia are stilled: Palkia’s wound heals, Dialga returns to its own dimension, and Palkia – asked very firmly by Ash – puts Alamos Town back exactly where it found it. In the sunset the group grieve for Darkrai, until Ash catches sight of a familiar shadow standing on the cliff above the towers, watching over the town. Over the credits Dawn competes in the Contest (Allegra takes the ribbon), the Legendaries sleep in their own dimension, and the journey through Sinnoh goes on.

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Major Characters

Ash Ketchum (Satoshi) is the first to be targeted by Darkrai and the first to trust it, and it is his stubborn climb to the top of the towers that saves the town. Dawn (Hikari) makes her movie debut here, with Piplup, Buneary, Pachirisu and Buizel in tow and a Contest to enter; Brock (Takeshi) is left to marshal the evacuation with Sudowoodo, Croagunk and Happiny. Pikachu gets the last word, powering the music machine with Pachirisu when nothing else will.
Darkrai (voiced by Kōji Ishizaka in Japanese and Scott Williams in English) is the film’s title character and its great misunderstood figure: a Pokémon whose very presence gives people nightmares, feared by the whole town, but which has quietly guarded Alamos since the day Alicia showed it kindness. Dialga and Palkia, the Legendary rulers of time and space, are less characters than a natural disaster – the first time two Legendaries have fought each other to a standstill on screen.
Alice (Rosa Katō / Khristine Hvam) is a balloon pilot and tour guide whose leaf-whistle melody is the key to the whole story, and whose grandmother Alicia befriended Darkrai as a child. Tonio (Kōji Yamamoto / Rich McNanna) is a bookish scientist, great-grandson of Godey, with a Drifblim and a diary that explains everything. Baron Alberto (Kōichi Yamadera / Ax Norman) is the town’s self-appointed hero, a preening aristocrat with a Lickilicky he comes to resemble rather too closely. The three Sinnoh Trainers – Allegra (voiced in Japanese by TV personality Shōko Nakagawa) with Infernape and Honchkrow, Kai with Empoleon and Maury with Torterra – show off the fully evolved Sinnoh starters, a tradition every generation’s first movie would follow from here on.

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Other Characters & Pokémon Debuts

The “World of Pokémon” opening gathers every Legendary from the first three generations bar Raikou – Regice, Regirock and Registeel, Lugia, Ho-Oh, Groudon, Kyogre and Rayquaza among them – with Lucario the only non-Legendary in the line-up. Alamos Town is full of Pokémon: Gallade is the first to raise the alarm, Alberto’s Lickilicky and Tonio’s Drifblim are never far from their owners, and the garden is home to Luxray and Luxio, Gible, Bronzor, Purugly, Tangrowth, Yanmega, Finneon and Lumineon, Chingling and Chimecho, an East Sea Shellos and a Cherrim that changes form in the sun. Several minor characters from earlier films turn up too: the man and his daughter from Pokémon Heroes (now with Chimecho and Chingling), a lookalike of Bogie, the Jirachi star-seller from Jirachi: Wish Maker, who sells Dawn a Lunar Wing, and the mother and daughter who read the legend of Rota in Lucario and the Mystery of Mew. Jessie, James and Meowth mostly try to break into the Baron’s mansion.

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Pokémon making their anime debut in the film

With Sinnoh barely nine months old, the film served as a showcase for Generation IV: nineteen Pokémon (twenty-one counting forms) made their first anime appearance here, a tally matched only by the first movies of the earlier generations.

• Darkrai#491 · the Pitch-Black Pokémon
• Infernape#392 · Allegra’s
• Empoleon#395 · Kai’s
• Torterra#389 · Maury’s
• Lickilicky#463 · Baron Alberto’s
• Drifblim#426 · Tonio’s
• Gallade#475
• Honchkrow#430 · Allegra’s
• Luxio#404
• Luxray#405
• Gible#443
• Bronzor#436
• Purugly#432
• Tangrowth#465
• Yanmega#469
• Chingling#433
• Finneon#456
• Lumineon#457
• Shellos#422 · East Sea form
• Cherrim#421 · Overcast Form
• Cherrim#421 · Sunshine Form

Cast

The voice cast of both the Japanese and English versions of The Rise of Darkrai. The Japanese guest cast is full of celebrities: veteran actor Kōji Ishizaka as Darkrai, actress Rosa Katō as Alice, the comedy duo Robert as Kai and Maury, and “Shokotan” Shōko Nakagawa as Allegra – the first of her many Pokémon movie roles.

Character	English voice actor	Japanese voice actor
Ash Ketchum (Satoshi)	Sarah Natochenny	Rica Matsumoto
Pikachu	Ikue Ōtani	Ikue Ōtani
Dawn (Hikari)	Emily Jenness	Megumi Toyoguchi
Brock (Takeshi)	Bill Rogers	Yūji Ueda
Jessie (Musashi)	Michele Knotz	Megumi Hayashibara
James (Kojirō)	Carter Cathcart (as Billy Beach)	Shin-ichirō Miki
Meowth (Nyarth)	Carter Cathcart (as Billy Beach)	Inuko Inuyama
Darkrai	Scott Williams	Kōji Ishizaka
Alice	Khristine Hvam	Rosa Katō
Tonio	Rich McNanna	Kōji Yamamoto
Baron Alberto	Ax Norman	Kōichi Yamadera
Allegra	Emily Williams	Shōko Nakagawa
Kai	Sean Reyes	Ryūji Akiyama
Maury	Joshua Swanson	Hiroshi Yamamoto
Alicia	Kayzie Rogers	—
Narrator	Rodger Parsons	Unshō Ishizuka

Trailer

The official English trailer for The Rise of Darkrai, from the official Pokémon YouTube channel.

Trading Cards

For the tenth film the Japanese card promotion looked backwards as much as forwards. The 10th Movie Commemoration Set, previewed at the World Hobby Fair in January 2007 and sold at cinemas from opening day on 14 July before a general release on 3 August, was an album of eleven holographic cards, one for the star of each previous movie and each named for where it was found: Striking Back Mewtwo, Explosive Birth Lugia, Crystal Tower’s Entei, Timeless Celebi, Alto Mare’s Latias and Latios, Seven Nights Jirachi, Visitor Deoxys, Tree of Beginning’s Mew, Wave-Guiding Hero Lucario and Prince of the Sea Manaphy, every one with an original Pokédex entry written for its film. The album had a twelfth, empty slot: it was made for the Darkrai promo (046/DP-P) handed to the first 4.2 million cinema-goers with their tickets.

For once a movie card made it out of Japan. The same Kouki Saitou Darkrai artwork became DP Black Star Promo 24 in English, first in the Darkrai Premium Box of May 2008 (in regular and jumbo sizes) and then, in a non-holofoil version, packed inside UK and Dutch copies of The Rise of Darkrai on DVD in September 2008 – the only time a Diamond and Pearl movie came with a card in the West. Everything is catalogued in our Trading Card Game section.

• 10th Movie Commemoration SetJapan, July 2007 · album of 11 cards
• Darkrai046/DP-P cinema gift · DP Promo 24 in English
• Striking Back MewtwoMewtwo Strikes Back
• Explosive Birth LugiaThe Power of One
• Crystal Tower’s EnteiSpell of the Unown
• Timeless CelebiCelebi: Voice of the Forest
• Alto Mare’s LatiasPokémon Heroes
• Alto Mare’s LatiosPokémon Heroes
• Seven Nights JirachiJirachi: Wish Maker
• Visitor DeoxysDestiny Deoxys
• Tree of Beginning’s MewLucario and the Mystery of Mew
• Wave-Guiding Hero LucarioLucario and the Mystery of Mew
• Prince of the Sea ManaphyPokémon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea

Movie Ads & Posters

Posters and home-video artwork for The Rise of Darkrai – the two Dialga vs. Palkia teasers that preceded the title reveal, the final Japanese one-sheets, the English poster, a Japanese magazine advert, and DVD releases from Japan, the States, the UK, Australia and the Netherlands, the last a complete sleeve with the back cover. More magazine clippings and adverts are always wanted.

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Trivia & Facts

• In Japan the film was released between Steamboat Willies! (DP039) and Top-Down Training! (DP040).
• A movie of firsts: the first to use the opening theme of the following season (a movie version of We Will Be Heroes, a year before Season 11), the first dubbed by DuArt Film & Video, the first rated PG in the United States – and the first rated there at all since Pokémon Heroes – and the first whose Japanese ending theme, Sarah Brightman and Chris Thompson’s I Will Be With You (Where the Lost Ones Go), was sung entirely in English.
• Japanese fans who pre-ordered tickets voted for which past movie Pokémon they wanted as a game download; Deoxys won. In the cinemas themselves a Darkrai knowing Roar of Time and Spacial Rend could be downloaded to Diamond and Pearl, with instructions delivered by the film’s cast before and after the feature; the Darkrai later given away in the US and Europe carried the Original Trainer name “ALAMOS”.
  

  

• It is the only Diamond and Pearl movie without a human antagonist, and it started the tradition of the first movie of each generation showing off the fully evolved starters – repeated with Victini, Diancie and Secrets of the Jungle. With eighteen debuts (twenty if Dialga and Palkia’s first proper appearances are counted) it matches Mewtwo Strikes Back, Spell of the Unown and Jirachi: Wish Maker, the other generation-openers, for new faces.
• Whether by accident or design, the plot echoes every one of the nine films before it: three Trainers with the fully evolved starters (Mewtwo Strikes Back), a crisis resolved by playing a song (The Power of One), the Unown dimension (Spell of the Unown), balloon travel (Celebi), a human turned into a Pokémon (Pokémon Heroes), two guest characters falling for each other (Jirachi), two Legendaries battling in the opening (Destiny Deoxys), flashbacks (Lucario) and Ash solving a puzzle to save the day (Temple of the Sea).
• Three sets of minor characters from earlier movies reappear: the man and his daughter seen with Aipom at the start of Pokémon Heroes, a lookalike of Bogie, who sold May her wishing star in Jirachi: Wish Maker and here sells Dawn a Lunar Wing, and the mother and girl who read the legend of Rota in Lucario and the Mystery of Mew, who would be back again in Giratina and the Sky Warrior.

  

  

• The Lunar Wing Dawn buys turns up again in the series in Sleepless in Pre-Battle!, which makes the movie canon to the anime; an official replica pendant was sold in Japan.
  

  

• Alamos Town is modelled on Barcelona and the Space-Time Towers on Gaudí’s Sagrada Família. This is also the only Pokémon movie whose title sequence does not use the opening theme of the original games.
  

  

• Every Legendary from the first three generations except Raikou appears in the opening, and Lucario is the only Pokémon among them that is neither Legendary nor Mythical. The only Shellos in the film is an East Sea one, even though the anime’s map places Alamos west of Mt. Coronet.
  

  

• Ash’s nightmare was originally going to be shown in full – a world without Pokémon – before the idea was cut; it was dusted off a decade later for I Choose You!. The trailers also promised a shot of Ash flying over Alamos on a Pidgeot and a confrontation with a darker version of himself, neither of which made the film.
• Baron Alberto’s name is a pun on Berobelt, Lickilicky’s Japanese name, which is why he is called “Baron Berobelt” once transformed (the dub settles for “Baron Lickilicky”); he is only the second human in the anime to be turned into a Pokémon. Kayzie Rogers, Max’s former voice, returned to the series as Alicia after a year away.
• In the English dub Darkrai announces “Dark Void” aloud, which it never does in Japanese, and a line from Godey’s diary gives it a gender – “Darkrai, who was hated by everyone else, opened his heart to Alicia” – although Darkrai is genderless in the games and the Japanese script. The dub also drops Ash calling Palkia an idiot while asking it to restore the town, and the original Cartoon Network airing cut Dawn’s Contest and Team Rocket’s raid on Alberto’s mansion.
• In a February 2021 poll on the official Pokémon website it was voted the most popular movie of the Diamond and Pearl era. The Japanese version ends with a segment showing the winning entries from a children’s drawing contest, themed on the Pikachu shorts.
  

  

Errors

• When Dawn sends out her Pokémon to play in the garden, the Japanese audio reuses the voice-over from Tanks for the Memories!.
• As Ash and Dawn’s Pokémon run up the spiral staircase inside the Space-Time Towers, Aipom is missing from the group for part of the scene.
• When Ash chases Darkrai, a flock of Murkrow flies over a rooftop; in the English dub their cries were left undubbed.
• As Dawn’s Buizel and Brock’s Sudowoodo run back to their Trainers and Lickilicky charges past, Lickilicky briefly overlaps a tree behind it.
  

  

• When Dialga and Palkia’s attacks collide, Dawn and Sudowoodo vanish during the shock-waves and reappear on the ground with everyone else as Alice asks if they are all right; later, as the group dodge Dialga’s Draco Meteor, Kai disappears for a moment from beside his Empoleon.
• The dub swaps Together2007 for We Will Be Heroes over a slightly shortened title sequence, which leaves an abrupt edit in the music.

Reviews & Reception

Dialga vs. Palkia vs. Darkrai was a smash in Japan. It opened at number one with ¥1.13 billion and 1.07 million admissions in its first three days – ahead of Temple of the Sea – and finished on around ¥5.02 billion, a franchise record at the time and enough to make it the fourth highest-grossing film of 2007 in Japan behind Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Hero, and the biggest anime film of the year.

In the West the film went straight to television and DVD, premiering on Cartoon Network on 24 February 2008 and arriving on disc from Viz Media on 27 May 2008; the Japanese DVD had come out on 21 December 2007, the UK release followed on 29 September 2008 and Australia on 5 November. Critics were kinder than usual: Anime News Network’s Carl Kimlinger gave it a B−, finding the story simple but reassuring for parents and the CG light-shows of the Legendary battle spectacular, while wishing the computer-generated architecture sat more comfortably next to the flat character designs; Den of Geek’s Jenny Sanders awarded four stars out of five for a well-structured script and an epic orchestral score, with the same reservation about the clash of styles.

Fans have been warmer still. The Rise of Darkrai is regularly named the best of the Sinnoh films and was voted the most popular Diamond and Pearl movie in an official 2021 poll, with Darkrai’s silent, misunderstood heroism, the Oración sequence and Sarah Brightman’s ending theme all singled out for praise. The UK has seen it re-released as part of Manga Entertainment’s Diamond & Pearl Collection in 2018, on its own in 2019 and on Blu-ray in December 2021.

Scores at a glance (as of October 2026)

• IMDb – 6.3/10 from around 4,100 user ratings
• Rotten Tomatoes – 75% audience score (1,000+ ratings) · no critics’ score – only one review“Doesn’t do anything different from the rest of the films” – Sebastian Zavala Kahn, Más Gamers
• Letterboxd – 3.4/5 average from 24,000+ ratings
• Anime News Network (review) – B− overall“Glossy, reasonably fun entertainment for kids” – Carl Kimlinger
• Anime News Network (ranking) – “Must Watch” tier in ANN’s ranking of every Pokémon movie