Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
From a certain point of view, this, not Oshi no Ko or Heavenly Delusion or any new or returning Shonen Jump adaptation, is the most anticipated premiere of the season. All of those other anime premieres are anime premieres, at the end of the day. Big Magikarp in a small pond, so to speak. Anything to do with Pokémon is a global event; it just plainly isn’t playing the same game that everything else I write about on this site is.
Pokémon Horizons, which began yesterday, is essentially the second “main” Pokémon anime, succeeding the storied 1,200-some episode saga of Ash Ketchum (Satoshi, as you likely know he’s known in his home country). The fact that Horizons exists and can be watched—although only via fansub for those of us outside Japan at the moment—still feels deeply surreal. But this first episode, which primarily exists as a from-square-one character building exercise for brand-new protagonist Liko [Minori Suzuki], makes it feel a bit less so. Liko, as we’re introduced to her here, feels very much like she should be the protagonist for this sort of story. She’s much more soft-spoken and a bit more of a thinker than her often hotheaded predecessor. She’s also rather insecure, in particular harboring a complex about how people often say that they don’t understand what she’s thinking. Indeed, leading with the protagonist of the two that seems to be much less like Ash first is probably the smart move. Also, her two-tone hair is pretty cute, and is further evidence for my conspiracy theory that, eventually, all anime characters will have at least two colors in their hair at minimum.
The first episode (one of two that aired back to back, but we’ll only be covering the first here, partly to give it parity with other shows this season but mostly just because the second isn’t available in English yet) sees Liko attending Indigo Academy, a school in the Kanto Region far from her native Paldea. There, she’s partnered with her starter Pokémon; a particularly willful Sprigatito that she spends much of the episode trying to bond with. There’s a distant echo of the Ash/Pikachu dynamic here, but aside from the fact that a cat scratch is not the equivalent of the Thundershock-to-the-face running gag of the first anime’s earlier seasons, Liko and Sprigatito also get on much sooner. Basically, as soon as Liko starts trying to understand the funny green cat on its own terms.
There’s a nice little bit of trackable progression in the series’ own language, too. Early in the episode Sprigatito struggles to even use Leafage, a very basic Grass-type move and a staple of its very first few levels in the games. By the episode’s end, it uses that same move to temporarily blind a freaking Rhyhorn, which it also promptly puts to sleep (seemingly with Sweet Scent. Which isn’t how that move works, but the show has never precisely followed the rules of the games, so that’s fine).
It’s super effective!
Yeah, about that Rhyhorn; anyone concerned that this is going to be some kind of laid-back slice of life series should stick around for the episode’s final few minutes. There, the mysterious “good luck charm” pendant that Liko’s been given by her grandmother turns out to be much more important than she could’ve possibly imagined. Our evident first antagonist, a fellow with black-and-white hair and weird eyes [Shun Horie], shows up with an obviously-falsified letter from Liko’s grandma on the first day of summer break, where the school just so happens to be sparsely populated. (Liko seems to be one of the relatively few students hanging out in the dorms over break rather than going home.) She’s rightly very suspicious of all this, and the guy’s demeanor doesn’t help. Eventually, she gets so freaked out that she tries fleeing out her bedroom window, only to be stopped by a minion working for this fellow, leading to the Rhyhorn battle previously described.
Things end on a truly exciting note; a man on a Charizard (of course it’s a Charizard) swoops in to protect Liko after she’s faced down with a Ceruledge. We know from pre-release press materials that this is Professor Friede [Taku Yashiro], and that the group of people he leads fly about the Pokemon World in an airship. But all of this is left to the realm of thrilling cliffhanger here, and we don’t get much more than that in this first episode, beyond one small twist that I’ll not spoil.
Taken on its own, this episode does definitely have the disadvantage of feeling like just one half of a whole. But, even then, this is clearly building up to being something special. Anyone worried that the spirit of true Pokémon adventure was in danger of dying out need not fret any longer, it’s clearly going to be just fine.
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