Sources: Wikidata · OpenAlex. The record of the motion picture, not an assessment of this cell.
FILM NOTES
Pokémon: The First Movie arrived in 1999 from Warner Bros. and 4Kids Entertainment, adapting the anime feature that had already stormed Japan the prior year. Riding the peak of Pokémon mania in the West, it became a genuine box office event, introducing American audiences to Mewtwo's origin story and cementing the franchise's cinematic ambitions beyond television. For collectors of animation and franchise history, this film represents a cultural threshold, the moment a Japanese property became a Hollywood theatrical draw.
This cell centers Mewtwo, the genetically engineered Pokémon whose creation and clones drive the film's central conflict about identity and purpose. Mewtwo remains one of the franchise's most collected characters, prized for its darker, more philosophical presence within a series otherwise built on lighter adventure. A cell naming both Mewtwo and its clones together points to the film's core visual and thematic pairing, the original set against its copies, a defining image from the movie's mythology and marketing.
This original motion picture film element has been examined and authenticated by Crown Grading in partnership with National Film Vault, and encapsulated for archival preservation.
Why so little survivesRelease prints were leased to theaters, not sold. When the run ended they went back to the distributor to be destroyed, and most were. What collectors hold today came from the prints that escaped that order, and no new 35mm prints of these films are being struck.
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