Review: Pokémon Horizons is the reinvention the Pokémon anime desperately needed
How do you move on from Ash Ketchum?
As iconic a main character as any, Ash Ketchum is Pokémon for multiple generations of fans. That being said, it was time to freshen things up.
Jokes about being perenially 10 years old aside, Ash had climbed the mountain. He’d finally won. He’d finished the game.
Now that we’ve had our farewell tour and heard that iconic “I wanna be the very best, intro one last time, Pikachu and Ash are enjoying some well-earned rest as we begin a new era in the anime with Pokémon Horizons.
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Starring new protagonists Liko and Roy, Pokémon Horizons breaks from the convention of the Pokémon anime instantly in several smart ways.
We don’t begin with Liko waking up in her small town in Paldea and going to the local professor for a Pokemon. Instead, Liko is a student at Indigo Academy, a school in the Kanto region for aspiring Pokémon trainers.
Right from the jump, the series appropriately broadens its horizons. All regions are in play, there’s an understanding that Pokémon come from all over the world, and the rigid structure of going after gym badges and fighting the Pokémon league seems (so far) mostly gone.
Instead, Liko and Roy travel with the Rising Volt Tacklers, a group of traveling Pokémon adventurers who sail across the world of Pokémon in their airship led, naturally, by a Pikachu in a captain’s hat. That’s Captain Pikachu, to you and me.
In the episodes we’ve watched, the show does a great job at quickly introducing characters and giving you a reason to care about them.
It’s all going at absolute break-neck speed, which comes at the cost of the first four episodes essentially feeling like one massive
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