The dog-fighting theme of Pokemon never really sat well with me.
It’s interesting that other games didn’t affect me the same way. In Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh, you summon monsters to the battlefield, but the angels, demons, elementals, etc of those games tend to be sentient beings that would have fought each other on moral grounds anyway. Further, those games (Yu-Gi-Oh especially) make it clear that the monsters are created by the cards.
In Bakugan, you are summoning robots to the battlefield; it feels a lot like BattleBots or Robot Wars. Even Digimon makes it clear that the creatures are “digital,” which at least implies that they were invented in a computer.
But Pokemon is different. They catch all of these little creatures, train them to fight each other, and keep them couped up inside little red and white balls. This isn’t two people fighting each other using the animals as weapons; the whole plot to this game is legalized dogfighting.
The reason why I bring this up is because I just saw a student film showing a potential trailer for a live action Pokemon film. Check it out:
People may disagree with me on the morality of Pokemon, but I don’t see how after watching that trailer. This is some serious Michael Vick stuff here!
Of course, Pokemon isn’t the worst of them. That honor clearly goes to Zatch Bell. Let me give it to you in a nutshell: it has a storyline almost identical to Pokemon, except that it uses children instead of dogs. Not kidding at all.
One other thing worth mentioning: there was a lot of flack in that video’s comment section about the animation, mostly by people who have never tried to animate on their own. I give kudos to the people that made that trailer; they did a great job.