National Film Vault

FILM NOTES

Warner Bros. distributed Pokémon: The Movie 2000 in North America during the summer of 2000, building on the extraordinary cultural momentum of the franchise's television and trading card phenomena. The film centered on the legendary bird Pokémon and the threat of global catastrophe, drawing massive audiences of young fans and marking a high point of the late-nineties Pokémon wave in Western markets.

This cell captures Pikachu in a quiet but striking composition, the small yellow figure set against a stone wall while a large curved structure arcs overhead. The continuous nature of the frames gives the cell an almost cinematic stillness, preserving Pikachu in a moment of solitude that contrasts with the film's otherwise epic scale.