Hacker Cinema
Pokémon Detective Pikachu
2019 · Film · 105 min
Directed by Rob Letterman
In a world where people collect pocket-size monsters (Pokémon) to do battle, a boy comes across an intelligent monster who seeks to be a detective.
2 positive1 negative2 mixedfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
This is only 1 hour 42 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAA_yWX8ycQ, but I could watch it all day. It was released as marketing for the Detective Pikachu movie and is a "Leak of the full movie by R Reynolds".
Please watch at least the first 2 minutes.
Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, Postal, Detective Pikachu, Sonic 1&2. Not necessary the greatest of cinema, but all of them did a good job of turning the source material into a movie. Probably helps that the source material of all of them is relative simple and leaves plenty of room for interpretation.
Also Steins;Gate, though that's a visual novel turned anime, not a regular game. But probably the best example of staying very close to the source material and succeeding.
Yeah, it's still impressive to be able to imitate those styles and add a blue cape that didn't exist in the movies, along with chihuahua eyes. It also appears to be higher definition than Detective Pikachu CG. I'm curious if you could do the same for all 150 original Pokemon, even those for which realistic CG representations don't exist. Would it be able to take the cartoon version of Farfetch'd or Psyduck or a more obscure one and achieve the same realism, without the reference from the deep dataset?
I think video game adaptations are almost universally bad, when they don't always have to be. We used to get pretty bad superhero movies, too, from directors that didn't seem to understand or respect what they were adapting.
Video games seem difficult to adapt generally --they often don't provide the building blocks for a good narrative. Potentially studios can do like what Detective Pikachu did, get a bit crazy, and still make something decent. Going in the other direction and making something which treats the source seriously hasn't generally worked well, even when it could have with better writing and direction.
It seems to me like Hollywood looks down on video games as an inferior medium, so their hearts (and budgets) are never in it fully. An "Iron Man moment" is possible, I think, where they put out something high quality that's faithful to the source, and its success leads to other high quality adaptations.
I’m very happy that Disney went whole-warthog in making the models realistic. This halfway between cartoony-but-real look isn’t good. The new Lion King was visually stunning and reminded me of a Nat Geo film. The characters didn’t emote very well, and the voice actors had to carry the performance, but at least the animals looked good.
(That’s not to say the story was great... but that’s also not the point.)
Detective Pikachu almost fell into the uncanny valley with some characters (especially the ones with the “real” eyes) for the same reason.
For 3-D cartoon animals, IMO Zootopia’s style really hit the sweet spot of cartoony-but-recognizable species.
Wow, 5 downvotes in under an hour for stating my opinion. Would somebody who thinks otherwise like to share?