Crown Grading
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FILM NOTES
Pokémon: The First Movie arrived in American theaters in November 1999 via Warner Bros., riding the crest of Pokémania as it swept US playgrounds, television schedules, and toy aisles. Adapted and expanded from the Japanese original, it introduced mainstream audiences to Mewtwo, a lab-born Pokémon wrestling with questions of identity and purpose. The promotional push that preceded the film, including trailers struck on 35mm for theatrical distribution, played a real role in building anticipation for what became a box office success and a defining artifact of the franchise's early American expansion.
This cell comes from that trailer reel, preserving a moment framed around Ash Ketchum and Mewtwo, the two figures whose clash anchors the film's central conflict. Ash represents the franchise's everyman hero, while Mewtwo stands as its most philosophically weighted creation, making any pairing of the two a point of interest for collectors tracing the character's screen history. As a trailer cell rather than a frame from the finished feature, it belongs to the marketing history of the film, a physical piece of the campaign that introduced Mewtwo and this confrontation to audiences before the movie itself opened.
Consistent with a 35mm release trailer print of Pokémon: The First Movie (1999).
- Gauge
- 35mm: four perforations per frame along both edges, and the strip holds about three full frames plus partial frames at each end.
- Perforations
- Four per frame on both edges, evenly spaced, with rounded-rectangle holes that look cleanly punched; the strip curves on the panel but the pitch stays regular.
- Soundtrack
- Two wavy variable-area optical tracks run beside the picture, with Dolby Digital data blocks in the gaps between the lower-edge perforations; no DTS or SDDS seen.
- Edge print
- Not visible in this capture
- Base & colour
- The base has a light blue tint along both edges; the dye image looks rich and saturated, with no obvious fade or colour shift.
- Projection history
- No lines, scratches, cue marks or splices seen at this size.
- Picture
- Positive image; the frames repeat the same shot consecutively, showing a Pokémon-style animated scene that fits the Pokémon film on record.
- Era check
- Optical tracks plus Dolby Digital blocks on a blue-tinted base are consistent with a late-1990s 35mm release print, matching a 1999 trailer.
