It’s currently raining outside my house; a cold, grey rain that promises no clear skies or emotional catharsis, but simply the inevitability of more storms, as I endure one more damp and dreary New England winter. Rain is a useful dramatic tool, but a lousy weather condition; though perhaps that’s a contradiction in terms, as it is only our personal experiences with rain that give it such strong narrative resonance. Either way, the short of it is that the weather here sucks, and I am once again employing that as an excuse to ship off to the shores of Alola, where it only rains when the drama absolutely demands it. Without further ado, let’s see what Ash and his companions have been getting up to this week!

Episode 29

Heck yeah, Lana on the Pokeproblem this week. She got perhaps the single most impressive cut of animation in the baseball episode, but that’s clearly not enough Lana content. Give us another Lana episode, you cowards!

“Which of these is the pokemon that scares us in today’s episode?” I will also accept haunted house episodes

See? Fifteen seconds in and the gang are already enjoying a riverside camping trip beneath a glorious bright blue sky. This show knows how to treat its characters and audience right

Very good proud Litten face after he lights a fire for Lillie, and of course Snowball immediately blows it out, and also asks for praise. Before watching this show, I hadn’t realized that such a core part of Pokemon’s appeal is capturing these charming, convincingly pet-like moments from the pokemon themselves. Having your pet recognize some repetitive action as a source of praise, but not understanding why it’s a source of praise, is an experience that’s likely familiar to any dog owners out there

And of course, this production is happy to jump from sequences that delight through their pet-like verisimilitude to fun cuts like the pokemon leaping into this tent, which embrace the far end of cartoonish pose-to-pose comedy. It’s a diverse set of strengths!

Aw shit, Lana’s got a ghost story for everyone. I appreciate her using a flashlight to light up her face even though it’s the middle of the day

Incredible faces all around as Lana relates her ghost story, and some nice shading tricks to add a sense of foreboding to her imagery

Oh my god, the smears and faces are so good for Lillie and Mallow getting surprised here. Even the momentary mid-cut faces are incredible if you go frame-by-frame

Apparently Shuuhei Yasuda and Noriko Itou handled AD duties on this episode themselves, which explains why everything’s so goddamn beautiful, including these momentary mid-cut shots

“Are You Going to Sleep in the Morelull Forest, Too?” I think I’ve figured out the Pokeproblem

They make curry, of course. As Persona has taught me, you can’t go camping without making curry

Oh my god, Ash just actually said that

I like that all of Lillie’s spare outfits are just more copies of the dress she always wears

Sophocles brought a lamp, and actually attaches it to Charjabug with positive and negative cables. I wonder if his family even pays an electric bill, or just plugs his various pokemon into their devices whenever they need a charge

Everyone is doing pokemon type-appropriate activities out in the wild: Mallow is gathering fruit, Lana is playing in the river, and Sophocles is, uh, checking his phone. Electricity!

Effective trick using the foliage to frame Mallow as she wanders through the forest. Along with just generally adding some visual complexity and depth into the frame, it also neatly implies that she’s being watched

And Steenee is our first victim!

Oh man, will this episode give me a chance to talk about the dynamics of horror movies? I LOVE HORROR MOVIES. And yeah, this is a classic first “kill” scenario here – the first victim just vanishes entirely, placing us alongside the main cast in their fear and disorientation. Horror movies must escalate in tension and drama while also making sure they carefully conserve the mystery and menace of their monster – revealing a monster tends to defuse its threat, so the trick is to add escalating tidbits of context over time, with each kill drawing us a bit closer to the awful truth

“It’s probably Iwanko again.” Another way of drawing out the tension in a horror film: make that spooky noise be a cat or dog the first time, which not only allows for an easy yet consequence-free jump scare early in the story, but also serves to disarm the protagonists’ sense of danger. You can also perform this trick with a late-arriving friend, or later in the film, you can have the end-of-second-act veteran arrive in a similarly terrifying fashion, only to reveal they’re actually the one person with experience fighting the monster. When a story opens on multiple ostensibly terrifying threats, the odds are pretty high that one of them is an ally in disguise

And at last, the monster attacks! THE ENERGY DRAIN BEGINS

This episode has had a siren perpetually playing at a very low pitch in the distance, an effective way of creating a disorienting, menacing atmosphere

I can see why they employed some of this production’s AD heavyweights for this episode – so much of the drama is carried by the distinctive character acting and expression work

Oh my god, all their energy-drained forms are so much

Rotom believes the culprit is Lillie, and I think he’s got something there

Even Lillie is surprised she’s the culprit, just like all criminal masterminds

Of course Kaki is the one who’s sure there’s a rational explanation for all of this, and shouldn’t we all just get to bed? The gang fall into horror crew roles pretty comfortably – Lana’s the eager ghost enthusiast, Kaki’s the sceptic, Ash is the brave leader, Sophocles is the snarky nerd, Mallow’s the sporty one, and Lillie is the innocent Final Girl

The Morelull arrives, and the team is drained once more!

Damnit Sophocles, don’t stumble away from the group on your hands and knees, that behavior has a one hundred percent horror movie fatality rate! Certainly a well-established Snarky Nerd Death, though

And as expected, he immediately stumbles on the Morelull

And of course, Lillie was the only one who wasn’t drained because she put anti-pokemon bug spray on. An important lesson for all you campers out there

“You mustn’t look at the spores!” Alright, zero points for understanding how spores work, Rotom

And Kaki gets himself drained for a third time. That’s what you get, skeptic!

Lillie always sleeps with her Clefairy doll, because she is a goddamn angel

Ash makes himself an energy conduit for curry-energy to flow into Morelull, thereby taming the savage beast. This show’s understanding of caloric energy is roughly equal to its understanding of spore-based transmission, but whatever, we’re rolling with it

I do appreciate how the show makes a consistent theme of Ash not gaining new pokemon purely through defeating them in battle, but rather through proving he is deserving of their trust, at which point they join him willingly. Considering pokemon are frequently framed as pets within this show, it’s a good lesson to teach kids – that they need to earn the love and respect of animals, and treat them right in all contexts

The migration of the Morelull feels like a very Mushishi-reminiscent moment. Incidentally, if you haven’t watched Mushishi, fix that as soon as possible. It is one of anime’s true treasures

“Where are they going?” “I’m not sure, but I’m sure excited to find out!” This line hits on the essence of Sun and Moon

Oh wow, this sequence at their gathering tree is breathtaking. Wonderful art for the tree and Morelulls, terrific lighting effects, and the animation of the growing tree is fluid as can be. They really went all out for this climax

And Done

Whoo, what a terrific episode that was! We started on the ensemble fun and terrific expression work of a group camping expedition, and just soared upwards from there, into the well-executed genre riffs of this episode’s horror sequence, and culminating in that gorgeous, richly atmospheric visit to the Morelull’s tree. The animation and expression work went above and beyond this week, with even the in-betweens featuring delightful warping faces, making for a worthy followup to the exceptional baseball episode. At nearly thirty episodes in, Sun and Moon is demonstrating it’s still both a formidable production and an engaging, inventive experience; these last few episodes have been some of its best so far, and I’m eager to see what the future holds.

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