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Pokemon: The Movie 2000 arrived from Warner Bros. and Nintendo/4Kids at the height of Pokemania, a theatrical follow-up to the 1998 original meant to keep the franchise's momentum alive on the big screen. Released in the summer of 2000, it paired the established Pikachu and friends with a broader mythology built around the legendary birds and a new guardian figure, reaching audiences who had already made the franchise a cultural fixture. For collectors of animation and franchise memorabilia, this era represents peak crossover between Japanese game design and American theatrical distribution.
This cell bears the name Lugia, the legendary sea guardian introduced as the film's central mythological figure, a Pokemon prized by collectors for its rarity in the games and its elevated status within the story as a balancing force among the elemental birds. As a 35MM cell from this production, it represents a physical fragment of hand-processed animation history tied directly to the character's theatrical debut, the kind of artifact sought by those building a collection around the franchise's earliest and most consequential feature film appearance.
