Power in Pokémon: The First Movie
A Master’s Thesis by Dominique Brigham
rMA Cultural Analysis (Arts and Culture) Supervisor: Hanneke Stuit
Second Reader: Esther Peeren June 2017
INTRODUCTION...1
A World Full of Pokémon...1
Pokémon: The First Movie...7
PART ONE: Translating Language and Divergent Narratives...12
Contamination in Translation...12
Corrupting Narrative Frames...17
PART TWO: Destabilizing the Power Hierarchies of Pokémon...23
An Unstable Self: Mewtwo and Dr. Fuji...23
Seizing Power: Mewtwo Strikes Back...28
Part of Both and None...32
PART THREE: The Monstrous Birth of an Antagonist...35
Loss Despite Victory...35
Mewtwo as Divergent Antagonist...38
Monsters Begetting Monsters...39
CONCLUSION...43
BIBLIOGRAPHY...45
APPENDIX...1
Full Transcripts...1
INTRODUCTION
“To a greater extent than many similar phenomena,Pokémon could be said to create – or at least to facilitate –
a ‘common culture’ among children. In the process, it could also be seen to develop their social and communicative competencies – skills in negotiation, self-confidence and even tolerance for others.”
David Buckingham, “Gotta Catch ’Em All”
A World Full of Pokémon
1996 in Japan and 1998 in the United States marked the arrival of a video game series that would go on to spawn a mega-franchise recognized around the world, and for young people (now termed millennials) such as myself, Pokémon1 became a phenomenon. In 2016, The
Pokémon Company celebrated the 20th anniversary of the franchise with the release of two new video games and a mobile app that revolutionized how players, new and old, interacted with Pokémon, a step (in my opinion) towards virtual reality gaming, which has been much anticipated by life-long fans.
Pokémon began with the release of two original games in Japan. Pokémon Red and Pokémon Green2 made their debut on the Japanese markets in 1996 and were later released in the
United States as Red and Blue, with incredible success, in 1998. “In its first year, the Pokémon franchise had generated $5 billion, almost as much as the whole US games industry in 1998” (Allison 380), and since then, the game series has expanded into 29 games which can be attributed to the “core” series of six generations. Online Pokémon database Bulbapedia estimates there are actually 124 games in total, including side and spin-off series, affiliated with the
Pokémon world. Two more handheld console games were released this past fall, entitled Pokémon Sun and Moon, as well as the worldwide release of mobile game Pokémon GO, which
allows players to use their smart phones for a real-time version of the traditional Pokémon games, finding and catching virtual Pokémon they come into contact with on the streets of the actual world. In addition, the game series has spawned a massively popular trading card game, over 800 episodes of anime, multiple manga volumes, and nineteen films, as well as a touring symphony3 of music to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the franchise. As Anne Allison points
out in her article “Portable Monsters and Commodity Cuteness: Pokemon as Japan’s New Global 1 Throughout this thesis, the term Pokémon, in italics, will refer to the overarching franchise, whereas Pokémon will reference the character-creatures themselves.
2 I will be referring to the first set of Pokémon games by their Japanese color release, rather than their American ones, over the course of this thesis.
3 This follows the extreme popularity and success of other franchises, such as The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy, also touring symphony productions of game music around the world.
Power,” that “while opinions vary on what accounts for Pokémon’s success, many attribute it to its media-mix configuration, a brilliant marketing campaign, and also the play concept itself” (382).
My own relationship with the ever-expanding world of Pokémon began Christmas of 1998, when I received the first generation game, Pokémon Red, as a gift from Santa Claus.
Pokémon was, at the time, the newest fad at school, a popular new import not quite yet
understood by my fellow students, let alone our parents who uncertainly purchased the handheld GameBoy Color consoles and the vibrant game cartridges, their boxes painted with the image of a fantastical, fire-breathing dragon or a giant tortoise with water cannons in its shell. I suspect that many parents believed the excitement and hype over the games would soon fade away, but unfortunately for my mother and father, they were soon dealing with the beginnings of an obsession. While I cannot speak to the exact experiences of my classmates and friends, I can admit without reservations that I fell into Poké-mania and never really climbed out, a happy obsession that only grew thanks to the release of the first feature film, Pokémon: The First
Movie in 1999.
I would hazard to say, however, that this reaction was not so uncommon. I recall many an afternoon spent trading the official playing cards with my friends, spending my allowance money on new card packs in the hopes of getting a super-rare holographic creature to add to my growing collection, seeking out new kids at school to initiate in-game trades and battles, and so on. Like Buckingham’s assessment of the franchise implies, Pokémon became the nexus of student life, an eight-year-old’s sure-fire method to making friends and conversation on the playground, even though the actual GameBoy consoles were never allowed on school campus. No doubt our parents were rather perplexed with our enthusiasm for this Japan-made product. In fact, my own parents grew so frustrated with my obsessive desire to collect, trade, and battle that my collection of cards was taken away, for fear that my performance in school would suffer due to the distraction Pokémon presented.4
Pokémon became a way for me to interact with other children at my school. We would
trade cards, battle via the primitive Link Cable technology—as WiFi was only a dream at that time—and talk about the most recent episode we’d seen on television. It became less of a hobby to my group of friends and more like a means of connection. We shared citizen rights to this brand new world, and as such, we could navigate it as we pleased and with whomever also spoke the common Pokémon tongue. As scholars Anne Allison, Jason Bainbridge, and David Buckingham and Julian Sefton-Green have all stated in their own articles, that Pokémon “might more appropriately be described in anthropological terms, as a ‘cultural practice’. Pokémon is something you do, not just something you read or watch or ‘consume’.” (Buckingham 370) The idea of doing rather than consuming, one active and the other relatively passive, relies heavily upon the interactivity of the subjects involved in the phenomenon. Pokémon is something to be shared among friends, be they close or global, as portrayed in the trailers for Sun and Moon,5 and
4 Suffice to say that, given I am writing this paper now, my parents’ efforts to dissuade my interest in Pokémon failed rather spectacularly.
this interactivity has been built in from the very start of the franchise. The culture that developed around Pokémon “encourages its audience to think in terms of world-building, filling in the gaps, nurturing the universe, creating canons that link the various platforms of Pokémon together…
Pokémon is as much about collecting knowledge as it is collecting species – classification
strategies, transferring knowledge between media platforms and discussing the details of this world” (Bainbridge 8). While familiarity with all platforms is not explicitly necessary to complete the games’ objectives of mastery, the interconnectivity of Pokémon within its own world speaks to the franchise’s longevity.
Any investigation of Pokémon must, of course, begin with the foundational video games. Players are dropped into the fictional world of Pokémon, currently divided into seven unique regions across the core game series, as Pokémon trainers, individuals who capture and use Pokémon to attain the vaunted position of Pokémon Master. This quest, made up of two key facets in the video games, turns up in nearly every branch of Pokémon. It also features heavily as the ultimate goal of main television and film character, Satoshi (Ash Ketchum6 in English), and
his fellow Pokémon trainers as they traverse the Pokémon-populated regions within the
Pokémon world. This objective has remained the same for the past twenty years, but as both
available technology and the intellectual demands of an aging audience advance, the world inhabited by trainers and Pokémon evolves in turn.
As noted above, Jason Bainbridge has observed that Pokémon is about collecting knowledge, an idea supported by the popular refrain of, “gotta catch ’em all” in the Western translations of the cartoons and the verb “getto-suru”7 in Japanese used to describe the action of
capturing Pokémon. The game mechanics are, at their core, quite simple. After being gifted with their starter Pokémon, trainers must catch (or get) wild Pokémon using Poké Balls, train and evolve them through non-lethal battle with other wild Pokémon and NPC (non-playable character) trainers, and complete a series of league battles for the right to compete in a final tournament and be named the Pokémon Champion. This is not synonymous, it should be noted, with being a Pokémon Master. Jason Bainbridge remarks in his article, “It is a Pokémon world,” that
the trainers’ rationale for catching, breeding and getting Pokémon to fight each other is held out as something more special and desirable than merely collecting. It is ethical acquisition for a purpose, consumption and containment with the goal of producing something at the end of it, a sustainable use of resources in the sense that they are fulfilling a role in the biology of the Pokémon, assisting them to evolve (by providing them with battles) (406).
Upon receiving her starter Pokémon, the trainer is tasked with completing the Pokédex, a portable and digital Pokémon encyclopedia given to the trainer at the beginning of her quest. In order to do this, she must capture and log each individual Pokémon species in the game. This mechanic is particularly difficult, as not all Pokémon are in fact present each game version, 6 This last name is a play on the slogan used by Nintendo America to advertise the game, “Gotta catch ’em all!” 7 Written in Japanese as: ゲットする (read literally as getto-suru, a combination of the appropriated English verb “get” and the Japanese infinitive of “to do”)
hence the release of each successive Pokémon generation games as pairs. Pokémon that cannot be found on Red Version are found on Blue, and vice versa, forcing players to virtually trade with one another in order to complete the Pokédex. Only by being named the Pokémon Champion and filling out the Pokédex can a trainer truly be called a Pokémon Master.
Obviously, this capture mechanic cannot play out in its entirety in the television series or throughout the many films that have become part of Pokémon, and I believe even the most dedicated of collectors would have difficulty acquiring every single trading card in the official game. However, the importance of capturing Pokémon remains ever-present even without Satoshi tossing Poké Balls at every Pokémon in sight, primarily due to the relationship implied in the act of capturing. Wild Pokémon are essentially stolen out of the wild and domesticated for the purpose of categorization, battle, and breeding. The Pokémon double as tools for battle and companions for travel, individuals to which trainers and viewing audiences can grow attached as they adventure through the world of Pokémon (Allison, Bainbridge). Quite rightly, these dual concepts of conquest and capture bring to mind uncomfortable notions of imperial colonialism. The games encourage a mentality of capitalistic invasion, wherein the player can only truly succeed if all Pokémon are caught and all trainers are defeated in battle. However, to counter this alarming incentive, the games outright reward a trainer’s generous and affectionate behavior toward her Pokémon, and the television series and films frequently portray the (often horrific) outcomes of mistreating Pokémon, both wild and captured.
The capturing and domesticating, referred to as training, of Pokémon implies the more familiar dynamics between human and pet or human and livestock. As Machiko Kusahara has pointed out in her argument, “[t]he way we see virtual animals is inevitably influenced by the way we see real animals. If the relationship is of a hierarchical nature, such relationship will be extended to virtual pets or robots” (302). The hierarchy that emerges between Pokémon and trainer necessarily differs from the real relationships we develop with animals due primarily to the fantastical powers Pokémon are allotted by the creators of the franchise. Pokémon manifest their powers in a variety of types, which can be categorized by trainers who are in search of building a battle team with particular strengths, and in the games, these powers cannot be turned against human beings. The capture mechanic prevents trainers themselves from being attacked and damaged by newly-caught Pokémon or those that they find in the wilderness. Any fantasy violence that does occur takes place in battles between Pokémon—wherein “defeated” Pokémon only faint, rather than die—or as a world-ending threat, such as an antagonist’s efforts to revive ancient super-powerful Pokémon that attack the world indiscriminately.8
This safe-human feature, so to speak, is not featured in the television series or, more explicitly, in the films. As the Pokémon games revolve around the goals of collecting and championing, the gamers are given a seemingly invincible character avatar through which they might immerse themselves in the Pokémon world. This avatar is not at risk of harm, but the Pokémon it is tasked with taking care of are, thereby shifting the gamer’s attention from the 8 The awakening of legendary Pokémon Groudon and Kyogre, legendary Pokémon of the earth and the sea respectively, is the primary effort of Teams Aqua and Magma in Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Sapphire.
character development normally present in such role-play games to the conquer-collect quest. These parameters are no longer in effect in the animated productions of Pokémon, wherein the audience does not take initiative in the story, development, or central quest of the protagonist Satoshi or his friends. Satoshi regularly comes into contact with belligerent wild Pokémon that chase and attack his party of travelers, as well as antagonists who use their own domesticated Pokémon against them outside of battle scenarios.
Pokémon films “form a critical (sometimes self-critical) space in the franchise though
they too follow a pattern, of [Satoshi] and company interacting with a legendary Pokémon (a Pokémon marked out by its uniqueness and considerable powers…) that someone else seeks to exploit” (Bainbridge 404). In some cases, the Pokémon itself becomes the antagonist against which Satoshi and his friends must band together. It is in such cases especially that the hierarchy of trainer-and-Pokémon cracks. In the video games, these legendary Pokémon can be captured like any other wild Pokémon, albeit with much more effort, and therefore are forced to conform to the safe-human feature just like the rest. Filmic representations of these same Pokémon, however, often attack, harm, and even kill humans, both aggressors and noncombatants. They behave fully as the superpowers they were created or born to be, possessing and acting upon their own powers and abilities with no human capable of standing in their way.
The power disparity that exists between legendary Pokémon and Satoshi usually resolves itself by the end of each film with an agreement or gesture of good will, rather than capture. This agreement or gesture can vary, depending on Satoshi’s role and the Pokémon’s situation following the climactic end to the film’s conflict. In most cases, the Pokémon returns to its wild state, never to be seen again and thereby eluding any attempts to reestablish the trainer-Pokémon hierarchy normally present between the characters, and Satoshi continues on his quest to (somehow) become Pokémon Master without it. These instances where the hierarchy breaks lay the groundwork for new conceptions of the Pokémon world, wherein Pokémon and trainers can coexist on somewhat equal footing without the need for a capture bond, but also point out a fundamental discrepancy between the video games and animated productions. While Pokémon games around the world, regardless of language, must follow the same linear paths of conquest and collection in order to be completed, the television series and films are not so tightly bound. There is no completion objective with a film, after all, only the narrative through which the characters may come to be known, and those narratives can prove themselves rather malleable through the medium of translation.
I have chosen the film, Pokémon: The First Movie, in particular as the object of my analysis not just because it is the first released by the franchise but because it is the common denominator for the entirety of fan expectations for any Pokémon film since. Pokémon: The
First Movie represents the culmination of Nintendo of America’s rapid-fire campaign to bring
first the United States and then the rest of the world into a full-on “Poké-mania” (Allison) spiral, and while this is understandable from a profit and marketing standpoint, it is equally important to note that Nintendo of America is not bring the strictly Japanese version of Pokémon to the West. In the condensed form of a feature film, Pokémon: The First Movie lays out what Nintendo of
America purportedly thinks the American public wants from Japanese culture imports: a filtered, translated product that depicts the familiar, even in the trappings of the unfamiliar.
This filtering of Japanese content through the medium of translation does not entirely expunge Pokémon: The First Movie of its inherent Japanese-ness. In fact, the whole process of translation, as I will demonstrate in later chapters, is a bleeding process, a seeping of cultures across linguistic boundaries regardless of the bandage-like edits Nintendo of America applied to the film in order to sell it. Rather than render the Japanese version of Pokémon: The First Movie invisible, the English-language translation gives it space to linger at the peripherals like a figure at the corner of one’s eye, always present and just barely out of sight. The linguistic and narrative separation afforded by translation allows for the existence of two films, one Japanese and one American, that stand together as separate but equal, representative of their respective audiences’ perceived expectations of the cultural juggernaut that the Pokémon franchise was becoming at the time. Pokémon: The First Movie set the precedent for how that juggernaut would lumber triumphantly into future success.
Since 1996, the millennial generation, of which I am a part, has grown up with Pokémon as a constant source of interaction and entertainment. The world of Pokémon is complex in one language, let alone the dozens into which the games, films, animated series, and trading cards have been translated, and continues to expand its fan base with each new installation. The fact that the Pokémon franchise primarily engages children should not preclude it from academic merit. Quite the opposite, the nature in which Nintendo of America marketed Pokémon: The
First Movie laid down the initial foundations for the ways Pokémon would continue to permeate
multiple levels of American popular culture. It is through Pokémon, specifically Nintendo of America’s translation of Pokémon, that many members of my generation came into contact with Japanese culture in a broader context. Indeed, my own fascination with and love for Japan grew out of my early obsession with Pokémon. My hours spent collecting Pokémon cards evolved into hours practicing the Japanese alphabets. I graduated from playing Pokémon Red Version to funneling my after-school time into other Japanese franchises like The Legend of Zelda and
Final Fantasy. When given the opportunity to visit the country when I was sixteen, I got a
part-time job to pay for the trip. In the writing of this thesis, I have come full circle in a way, returning to Pokémon as an adult in order to examine how its impact has affected my childhood and that of millions.
While I would argue this is a happy ending in my case, I would be irresponsible to neglect mentioning the nefarious side of Nintendo of America’s machinations in bringing a more “palatable” version of Pokémon to the United States. Not only does the company score profits in the millions, but it also successfully peddles a perception of Japanese culture that does not necessarily exist. The translations of various Pokémon facets do purport the core narrative that is
Pokémon—acquisition of knowledge and domination of Pokémon creatures, as I have explained
above—but simultaneously enforce a strict understanding of the cultural norms into which
Pokémon is imported. This is seen most keenly in how Pokémon: The First Movie is translated to
better fit the sensibilities Nintendo of America believes target American audiences to have at the time of the film’s release. The millennial fascination with Japan began with Pokémon, and the
thoughts and beliefs we carry about Japan were established by how Nintendo of America delivered Pokémon to us; therefore, I believe examining Pokémon as an academic adult, now more aware of corporate motives like profit and global marketing as I was not when I was young, can allow for significant insight into how Nintendo of America’s initial foundations for the franchise in the West have influenced the growth of interest in Japan for an entire generation.
Pokémon: The First Movie
Pokémon: The First Movie was initially released in Japan on July 18, 1998. Nintendo of
America—responsible for the marketing and distribution of the franchise in North America and the rest of the West—waited until November 10, 1999 to debut the film, distributing it to American cinemas through Warner Bros Entertainment Inc. As Anne Allison writes, “by this point, the country was judged to be in the grip of Poké-mania” (241), fed since September 1998 on a steady diet of cartoons, video games, playing cards, and memorabilia. The success of the film in mainstream cinemas across the United States shocked creators and distributors alike, earning “in one day $10.1 million which built to $85 million for overall US sales” (Allison 236).
To summarize briefly, the film chronicles the conflict between the first genetically engineered Pokémon, Mewtwo, and the trio of trainers with whom children audiences were familiar—Satoshi, his companion Pokémon Pikachu, and his friends, Kasumi and Takeshi. This conflict finds its origins in Mewtwo’s creation and his reaction to learning of that creation, and the portrayal of that reaction reverberates throughout the rest of the film. Depending on the version viewed, Japanese or American, the motivations of various characters end up changing and therefore impact the rest of the narrative and the ultimate message of the film. The narrative split between the versions begins with Mewtwo’s first and only conscious encounter with his human creators, and it is this exchange that throws the differences between the Japanese and American versions into such sharp relief.
Following Mewtwo’s introduction, the film then brings in the main characters that audiences would be familiar with from the television series: Satoshi, Pikachu, Kasumi, and Takeshi, as I mentioned above. They, in addition to many other strong trainers, have been invited to challenge someone who has proclaimed themselves to be the world’s greatest Pokémon Master. After fighting through a hurricane, the trainers learn that this Pokémon Master is in fact Mewtwo, who reveals his plan to use the hurricane—which he created through his psychic powers—to wipe out humanity and leave all Pokémon free of their poisonous influence. Satoshi challenges Mewtwo on his stance, resulting in a brutal battle between the trainer-owned, natural-born Pokémon and the clones Mewtwo has created with the laboratory facilities on the island. In order to stop the battle, Satoshi throws himself in the middle of Mewtwo’s fight with his born counterpart, Mew, and is petrified into stone. His sacrifice moves both cloned and natural-born Pokémon to weep for him, and their tears revive him from his death-like state. Mewtwo chooses to depart the island with Mew and his clones, wiping the memories of all the trainers and their Pokémon before vanishing. Satoshi and the other trainers find themselves back on the mainland, confused, and resolve to continue their adventures with some light-hearted teasing.
To successfully bring this film to American audiences, Nintendo of America and its production affiliates made the decision to adapt the literal translation of Pokémon: The First
Movie to reflect what they perceived to best fit known American values and sensibilities, which
continues the company’s professed aim to displace the Pokémon franchise from its Japanese origins to something entirely uprooted from all cultures. As Lawrence Venuti states in his book,
The Translator’s Invisibility, “translation is the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural
difference of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible to the target language reader” (18). Pokémon, according to Nintendo of America, was marketed and translated to exist outside of cultural boundaries as its own self-contained world, accessible through manufactured points of entry (games, cartoons, films, etc.); however, these access points must necessarily “speak” the same language as those hopeful inhabitants. That is, an American audience must have a version of Pokémon that has been translated into a narrative familiar to them in order for the franchise to survive in America.
Pokémon: The First Movie distinguishes itself from the rest of the franchise’s film oeuvre
not only by being the first feature length Pokémon production but also in laying the foundations for how each subsequent film was to be translated for Western audiences. As the American versions of the films are the ones distributed further to Europe, Nintendo of America’s initial foray into the process of translation with Pokémon: The First Movie affected and continues to affect the version of Pokémon seen by the entirety of the Western world. Hence, any analysis of
Pokémon: The First Movie must begin with addressing how the translation process interacted
with and in some ways corrupted the film’s narrative.
This thesis aims to explore Pokémon: The First Movie as an example of how translation functions as a distortion technique rather than a clarifying one, as theorists Walter Benjamin and Rey Chow suggest in their own analyses. By this I mean that translation allows for and indeed encourages the modification of narrative, the distortion of details, in ways that are not necessarily negative. My contention is that, in this case, translation functions less as an arcade, which “casts a light on the original in such a way as to make the original shine more brilliantly” (Chow 200), and more as a hall of mirrors. A hall of mirrors is a trap-like maze filled with mirrors and glass panes that impede one’s progress. Some mirrors may be curved, convex, or concave to produce different distorted reflections, some humorous, some odd, some frightening. When a person stands before one of these mirrors, the distorted reflection is still fundamentally human, but different aspects of this human may have been emphasized or diminished. These distorted reflections then look back upon the human, who in turn may or may not distort the conception of her own self when confronted with the changes a warped mirror brings into being. As a person walks the hall of mirrors, she is accompanied by her reflections, unable to stop and conceive of her self without also perceiving and apprehending them. It is this idea of corrupting reciprocity, a sort of cross-boundary contamination, that I believe is most useful and productive about the process of translation.
The Japanese version of the film for the most part corresponds visually with the American version, but their languages distort the story the animation portrays. My analysis will show that, in this film’s case, the classic binary of original and translation is not an appropriate
method of inquiry, as the English translation results not in a linguistically accurate rendering of the Japanese dialogue but in a new narrative scheme entirely, one that takes aspects of its counterpart and builds or breaks them as needed to appeal to American audiences. These distortions begin with a pivotal four-minute, twenty-four second scene at the start of the film, the first interactions between Mewtwo and his creator, Dr. Fuji. Through the readings of these dialogues, I propose that translation creates the opportunity for two vastly different communities of fans—Japanese and American—who can interact with the same narrative substance and yet manage to take away radically differing narrative frames, as a result of translation.
Alongside the new narrative frameworks brought about by translation come new motives for character development and action. The trainer-Pokémon relationship I noted above becomes a point of high contention throughout Pokémon: The First Movie, but depending on the language, the source of this conflict originates for different reasons and depends heavily on how Mewtwo responds to Dr. Fuji. Both, however, co-dependently grapple with the hierarchical dynamics of power established by the Pokémon franchise as a whole. This is the first instance, to be repeated over the course of nineteen films, of a super-powered Pokémon confronting and (in this case, violently) breaking the trainer-Pokémon hierarchy, and how Mewtwo is treated in each version affects his actions throughout the rest of the film, as well as those of the other characters and Pokémon.
Through my examinations, I will show that Mewtwo and Dr. Fuji’s interactions are themselves distorted and adapted thanks to the translation process. They do not follow the rules of how a captured and domesticated Pokémon should behave with its trainer, in part due to Mewtwo’s status as a created Pokémon. Instead, Mewtwo and Dr. Fuji represent a bastardized version of the benign and productive partnership seen elsewhere in the franchise, a torn and conflicted relationship that highlights everything that can go wrong in the Pokémon world when a trainer mistreats a Pokémon. Mewtwo uses the psychic powers afforded to him by nature against his human creators, flipping the trainer-Pokémon hierarchy on its head. He is not domesticated by his cloned nature but enhanced by it, made wildly powerful by human intervention where other Pokémon have been made tame. The carefully delineated roles of Pokémon and humans dissolve into chaos when Mewtwo attacks the humans who created him, and this dissolution results in the creation of the franchise’s first legitimately frightening Pokémon antagonist.
Mewtwo’s position as antagonist in the film corrupts the foundations of Pokémon itself. This is a Pokémon that cannot be caught or tamed, a force of his own in the world and entirely willing to turn his immense power on those who fight against him. Like the translation of the film itself, the Mewtwo found in the American version represents a distorted reflection of his Japanese counterpart, though neither Pokémon is any less the antagonist. He is pushed into this antagonism by vastly differing motives, motives which are dependent on the language by which the narrative is framed. He commits the same crimes against Pokémon and trainers alike, but these actions are informed by diverging ideological ends which could not exist without the distortions made by translation in the first place.
What I attempt to do with Pokémon: The First Movie is encourage an encounter with both the Japanese source and the American translation at the same time, reflections of each other and their respective cultures and languages that they are, as well as an encounter with the power structures that exist between and within the two versions. Just as the Pokémon franchise is predicated on the concurrent release of two games in every generation (Silver and Gold, Pearl and Diamond, Black and White, etc.), so too is my analysis predicated on the idea that there are two versions of Pokémon: The First Movie, the plots of both centering around the key figure of Mewtwo; therefore, following Venuti when he speaks of the relation between original and translation, I will be treating each film as “derivative [of the other]: both consist of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that neither the foreign writer nor the translator originates, and that destabilize the work of signification, inevitably exceeding and possibly conflicting with their intentions” (Venuti 18). Mewtwo himself is at the nexus of this film, a character embodying all of humanity’s ingenuity and desire for control, as well as that immutable power all Pokémon seem to possess, but it is truly up to Japanese and American audiences to determine what kind of character he turns out to be. This thesis will show that translating is an act of corruption, and the end product, while not necessarily independent, is more than capable of standing on its own distorted feet.
This thesis has been divided into three sections for the purpose of dissecting how the linguistic translation of Pokémon: The First Movie affects the trainer-Pokémon power dynamics that exist between Mewtwo and Dr. Fuji. These differing depictions of power dynamics then inform how Mewtwo comes to be portrayed as the antagonist of the film as a whole. Throughout this thesis, I make use of tables depicting the film’s scripts, side by side in both Japanese and English, for reference and analysis.
In Part One, entitled Translating Language and Diverging Narratives, I take an in-depth look at how translation influences the framing of my chosen film clip’s narrative, which in turn affects the narrative of the film as a whole. Utilizing Rey Chow’s arguments on cultural translation, I explore further my notion of the translation process as a hall of mirrors, as well as the function of what Chow describes as contamination in the translation of Mewtwo’s introductory scenes. In doing so, I posit that translation is the starting point from which the two films diverge to tackle the trainer-Pokémon power dynamics from differing cultural points of view.
Part Two, Destabilizing Power Hierarchies of Pokémon, then discusses these diverging approaches to Pokémon’s familiar power dynamics as they relate to the special case of Mewtwo and Dr. Fuji. In Pokémon: The First Movie, I believe the concept and possessing of power coalesces around Mewtwo’s (in)ability to form an identity, which is based upon his initial relationship with his human creators. By unpacking Mark Haugaard’s definition of power, Michael Mann’s concept of organizational outflanking, and Meir Dan-Cohen’s investigation of ownership, I explain how the uncomfortable and even painful relationship between Mewtwo and Dr. Fuji ultimately results in Mewtwo’s violent backlash against humanity, which places the Pokémon in his position as film antagonist.
Finally, in The Monstrous Birth of an Antagonist, Part Three of this thesis, I explore Mewtwo’s antagonistic status through the lens of the monstrous, as defined by Jeffrey Cohen. As the product of a human-conducted cloning experiment and a breaker of the trainer-Pokémon bond, Mewtwo represents the dark underbelly of the Pokémon world. He is an all-powerful hybrid, outside of the norm and threatening to destroy it. The type of threat he poses, however, relies entirely on the way his narrative is framed by the translation of the film, and the solution to neutralizing this threat can be found in how he first upset the balance of power between trainer and Pokémon in the first place. I conclude in analyzing how the inceptions of Mewtwo’s monstrosity informs their resolutions and how both versions of Pokémon: The First Movie expose vital aspects of Pokémon that have kept the franchise alive and well in the hearts of its fans.
PART ONE: Translating Language and Divergent Narratives
“The task of the translator consists in finding the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original.”Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”
“Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.”
Terry Prachett, Witches Abroad
Contamination in Translation
In order to look specifically at how the film’s narrative plays with the language in which it is told, this part will focus on the transcripts of the key scene I discussed earlier, which takes place at the beginning of Pokémon: The First Movie. As previously stated, I chose to center my analysis of translation on this clip in particular because it sets the tone for the rest of both versions of the film. However, where this clip is the actual opening scene of the American version (henceforth referred to as A Version), it appears in the Japanese version (henceforth referred to as J Version) after ten minutes of additional footage, which were removed from the American release of the film and subsequent distributions across Europe.
I have given the monikers of J and A Version to the Japanese and American-language films for two reasons. Firstly, I do so as an homage to the release pattern of the franchise established in 1996. As stated briefly in my introduction, the Pokémon games are always released in pairs: Red and Green, Ruby and Sapphire, Sun and Moon, etc. The game themes and visual content do not vary in the slightest between the two that make up the pair, but there are some Pokémon exclusive to each. In order to complete the Pokédex, players must coordinate with others who have their game’s counterpart for trading purposes. Similarly, the J and A Versions of Pokémon: The First Movie incorporate the same “themes”—cloned Pokémon fighting with natural-born Pokémon, human protagonists coming into conflict with Pokémon antagonists, the breaking of trainer-Pokémon hierarchy—and animated visual content, but there are certain facets exclusive to each, primarily the language in which each Version is told, which affect the clip’s narrative framework and the rest of the film following.
Secondly, I refer to them as Versions as opposed to original and translation because to use the latter terms would be to ignore the substantial amount of independence A Version has
from J Version. In doing so, I depart from the common fidelity discourse often found in translation theory because, as Gary Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheons state in their article “On the Origin of Adaptations,” to consider either Version’s narrative worth, “only in relation to its faithfulness or closeness to the “original” or “source” text threatens to reinforce the current low estimation (in terms of cultural capital) of what is, in fact, a common and persistent way humans have always told and retold stories” (444). This article deals, obviously, with the nature of translation rather than adaptation, but I do not intend to draw a hard line between the two.
Translation requires a measure of adaptation, on behalf of the translator and the receiving audience, in order to travel across cultural boundaries. In this context, Rey Chow suggests that “the ‘first’ and ‘original’ as such is always already différance—always already translated. There are two possible paths from this lesson: one leads… back to the painstaking study of the ‘original’ as an original failure; the other leads to the work of translations and the values arising from them without privileging the ‘original’ simply because it was there first” (193). In examining A and J Version side by side, with their scripts carefully matched to each other, I have endeavored to place them on equal footing, deserving of the same treatment as full and complete materials unto themselves no matter which came first. The narratives presented in both Versions through their respective languages carry their own weight in terms of plot and character development, transmitted over the same visual content.
I would argue, therefore, that the adaptations made when individuals working under Nintendo of America translated Pokémon: The First Movie only enhance the necessity of using the term Version rather than original and translation. J and A Version are reliant upon each other, reflections of each other, but this in no way impedes their individual worth as independent stories. To begin my analysis of each Version’s narrative framework, I will consider the ten minutes of footage, present in J Version, that have been removed from the beginning of A Version. This footage details the discovery of the fossilized remains of Mew, an ancient Pokémon, that makes cloning Mewtwo9 possible, as well as the latter’s psychic and physical
growth. It also explains Dr. Fuji’s motivations for engaging in this scientific project in the first place, motivations which are only hinted at and subsequently treated rather differently in A Version.
J Version begins with a group of scientists and archaeologists searching for the remnants of what they describe to be the first Pokémon, Mew, said to have an immortal life force. They manage to recover a fossil of the Pokémon’s eyelash, containing enough genetic material to clone, and bring it back to an isolated island laboratory to begin testing. Shortly after, a Pokémon bearing some vague resemblances to the ancient Pokémon’s carved likeness appears in a massive test incubation tube, the obvious result of the scientific experimentations. As the scientists speculate on the clone’s viability in relation to clones attempted before, the scene changes to reflect the young Pokémon’s subconscious.
9 I will be using the American names for all Pokémon throughout this thesis, as they are the ones most familiar to me as an American researcher of the franchise, and English-translated dialogue lines rather than Japanese Romaji or Hiragana.
The Pokémon, clearly adolescent by its young male tone of voice, interacts with the spirit of a girl, who introduces herself as Ai. Ai and three other cloned Pokémon—recognizable to those familiar with the franchise as the three starter Pokémon of Pokémon Red and Green—play and teach their new clone companion, named Mewtwo by scientists, what little they themselves know about the imaginary world they inhabit, built from the fragments of memory Ai retains from her actual human self. Ai is, in fact, Aitwo, the digitally rendered copy of a dead girl’s memories and consciousness created by her father, Dr. Fuji, who heads the Mew-cloning project. This fact is revealed by Fuji’s monochrome flashback scenes cut between the clones’ frolicking in their dream world. Fuji wants to develop a viable clone of Mew not only to produce the strongest Pokémon ever seen, but ultimately to figure out how he can use the latent immortal potential in Mew’s genes to create a stable body for Aitwo’s consciousness and so regain the daughter he lost. Mewtwo’s creation seems to be a secondary goal for him.
These dreams meet a tragic end, though, as one by one, the starter Pokémon clones begin to fail and vanish from the dream world Mewtwo shares with them through his psychic powers. In the physical world, their heartbeats go silent. Aitwo suffers the same fate, a second death in a sense, and before she vanishes, Mewtwo begins to cry. She explains to him that while all living beings weep tears out of bodily pain, only humans weep out of sadness. Her final lesson imparted, Aitwo’s sparkling digital rendering fades from its containment tube. Mewtwo’s understandable distress causes his vital signs to spike erratically, and Fuji gives the order to sedate him in the hopes of preserving the clone’s life. While in this deep sedated sleep, Mewtwo eventually forgets the happy teachings Aitwo imparted to him. He returns to a sort of pre-birth darkness, permeated by and producing nothing.
It is at this point, in the darkness of Mewtwo’s pre-birth and at the 10:40 mark in J Version, that A Version begins and the film proceeds without any further visual changes.10 My
chosen clip of analysis also begins here, extending for four minutes and twenty-five seconds, and has been more thoroughly summarized below. Mewtwo is brought from his comatose state and is informed by Dr. Fuji that his purpose as the strongest (cloned) Pokémon in the world was to serve for further human experiments. Enraged, Mewtwo unleashes his psychic powers and destroys the laboratory, killing everyone inside. In the wreckage, he is met by Giovanni, an antagonist in both the television and game series, and tricked into becoming a weapon for Giovanni to use in Pokémon battles. In light of this discovery, Mewtwo escapes and returns to the island of his birth, swearing to avenge himself upon the whole of humanity for what he has endured.
Following Mewtwo’s return to the island, the film proceeds to introduce the familiar main characters of Satoshi, Pikachu, Kasumi, and Takeshi embroiled in yet another adventure. They have been invited, along with a host of other strong trainers, to take on an individual claiming to be the world’s greatest Pokémon Master. After surviving a hurricane on the way to the battle venue, which audiences will recognize as the island of Mewtwo’s birth, the trainers 10 This is not strictly true in the grand scheme of the franchise, as certain elements of scenery, such as Japanese words and characters on shopfronts and restaurants, were changed to reflect Nintendo of America’s apparent desire to make Pokémon a culture of its own. This was also done in episodes of the television series as needed.
find that it is Mewtwo himself who is the mysterious Pokémon Master. He reveals that he created the hurricane with the intention to wipe out humanity, thereby freeing Pokémon of the poisonous influence of trainers. Satoshi scorns Mewtwo’s plans, and what follows is a brutal battle between the trainer-owned, natural-born Pokémon and the clone Mewtwo manufactured with the laboratory facilities he rebuilt on the island.
As the battle ensues, the trainers discover that Mewtwo’s clones are vastly superior to their natural-born counterparts in terms of strength, just as Mewtwo was engineered to be superior to Mew. Seemingly drawn by the turmoil, a living Mew—possibly a descendant of the ancient Pokémon whose fossil was recovered and later used for cloning Mewtwo—arrives on the scene to confront Mewtwo. What the natural-born Pokémon lack in pure strength, they make up for it with fierce stubborn loyalty to their trainers, and the two sides clash and fight until Satoshi throws himself into the fray. Caught between Mewtwo and Mew’s psychic attacks, his body is petrified into solid stone. His sacrifice halts the battle and moves both cloned and natural-born Pokémon to tears. These tears revive Satoshi from his death-like state, and Mewtwo appears to experience a change of heart or intentions. He departs the island with Mew and his clones, using his psychic powers to wipe the memories of this conflict from the minds of all the trainers and their Pokémon before vanishing completely. The film concludes on a light, hopeful note with Satoshi and the others back on the mainland, pleasantly confused as to why they were there in the first place.
I have written this more developed summary of the film in comparison with what I provided in the introduction with as many objective details as possible and without any direct references to dialogue and character motivations because the interpretation of those dialogues and motivations change dramatically depending on Mewtwo’s conscious birthing scene. In order to illustrate these stark differences, this chapter will focus on analyzing the transcripts11 from the
scene summarized below, which I will be referring to as the Birthing. These transcripts have been written in two columns, one containing the Japanese translations and the other the English dubbing, and ordered in such a way that lines spoken at the same point in the animation are level with one another to show concurrence. Doing this pushes to the fore two critical questions to be dealt with by translators and storytellers alike: what has been removed or added? How do these edits affect the way the story is told? Which story is being told in the end?
As I mentioned in the introduction, Pokémon: The First Movie set the tone for how Nintendo of America handled all translations for subsequent films. The differences I will discuss below came about as a direct result of Nintendo America’s desire to translate Pokémon: The
First Movie into a film that would attract the masses of child fans to theaters across the United
States. Anne Allison notes that “American marketers were keen to neutralize the overt signs that
Pokémon came from Japan” (245), an active displacement of an entire franchise which required
American efforts in “clarifying and pinning down what was left ambiguous in the original” 11 Located in their entirety in the Appendix, these scripts have been more thoroughly transcribed to include the Japanese alphabets to the best of my approximation, without official Nintendo or Warner Brothers scripts to work from.
(246). The narrative was carefully tuned and adjusted to what Nintendo America believed would make the most sense to an American audience and therefore bring in the most profit.
In his analysis of how certain translations of texts such as Lysistrata appeal to different demographics, David Damrosch suggests that “we should read [translations] in the awareness that we need in a sense to translate the translations in turn, taking into account the ways the translator has interpreted the original” (84). By this, Damrosch makes the claim that readers—or audiences—should be aware that translation is subjective to both the individual or conglomerate involved in the process and the people at whom the final product is targeted. He argues that translators will tailor a translation in order to connect directly with a select group of people, be they from the southern parts of the United States or the north of Scotland. Because Nintendo of America’s apparent goal with Pokémon: The First Movie was to produce a product both viable and familiar to a particular audience, American viewers should consider that a version of this film which did not fit Nintendo America’s mold still exists and affects—or contaminates—how A Version’s story was consequently told.
This idea of contamination stems from Rey Chow’s examination of cultural translation. Specifically, she analyzes how Chinese cinema has been received by Chinese audiences, who perceive the exoticization of their native cultures in Chinese-directed films to be a product of “the continual privileging of Western models of language, philosophy, and historiography as ‘standard knowledge,’ and the continual marginalization of the equivalents from the non-West” (Chow 177). The imposition of Western cultural values on what are considered to be essential Chinese histories cuts deeply to ever-present worries that inhabit those individuals and peoples who are not considered (by the West) to be part of the West. However, it is precisely through film, created by Chinese directors utilizing both Western and Chinese techniques of storytelling, Chow argues the Chinese public can in turn come into contact with visceral and visual depictions of their own histories. These depictions are necessarily messy, conveying both a betrayal of nationalistic loyalties and a touting of a rich culture that thrived long before the West made contact with China, and Chow ends her analysis with the claim that “if translation is a form of betrayal, then the translators pay their debt by bringing fame to the ethnic culture” (202) and pushing it into a globalized cinematic oeuvre otherwise dominated by Western material.
Contamination as a concept is not strictly limited to translation or adaptation, as shown by what Marco Pellitteri says of cultural anthropologist James Clifford’s term, traveling culture: “[a] constant process of circulation of cultures which, after having found a base, start traveling again under different forms, because human cultural activity—life…—is always changing and cannot be kept in stable forms forever but is modified and progresses all the time” (117). Upon further research, I found that Clifford refers primarily to physical travel and the tangible taking of one’s culture along in the process of ethnographical/anthropological research or simple tourism, but the term can equally apply to how modern media circulates cultural origins as source material for cultural production all around the world. I would say that translation, which allows for a, albeit distorted, view of culture, accomplishes the same effects in that it is a constant process of circulation, modifying and progressing as it is employed over a variety of mediums and texts.
This process of circulation reflects what Chow quotes as the “translation of meaning,” (183) as well as technique and language and material, in which culture-making is problematized alongside culture consumption. Her argument here asserts that meaning-making, rather than faithful literalness as in the fidelity discourse of translation, has always been the aim of the process of translation, but I would take that idea of meaning-making a step further. Meaning-making implies taking a set of observations and deriving another set from them in a relatively direct fashion. I believe, in the case of Pokémon: The First Movie, that the act of translation becomes, instead, a feedback loop, pulling from one cultural source to another and dragging bits and pieces of that source along to permeate the next as the translation (and translator) travels, a loop which folds over on itself and eradicates a single path of meaning-making.
My analysis will show, through careful review of transcripts and dialogue in the Birthing scene, that contamination works with both A Version and J Version in order to produce two storylines that reflect and repudiate one another. In doing so, Pokémon: The First Movie becomes more of a hall of mirrors than a unidirectional translation. A Version and J Version take details from one another and allow them to warp, the shape of the cultural glass allowing for the revealing of new and strange facets previously hidden to shine through. They shine equally in their own turns, neither shining more brightly than the other, each standing as products of their cultural audiences.
As such, I will be investigating how the dialogue of A Version and J Version respectively reflects and warps key aspects of narrative framing. Because the interactions between Aitwo and Mewtwo are not present in A Version, translators needed to somehow ensure a smooth opening scene that precluded the need to reference to this missing material throughout the rest of the film. To make the approaches to the adult Mewtwo’s introduction more evident, I have sought to provide accurate transcripts in English and Japanese as well as I could without access to the official film scripts, along with localized clips of those scenes which I will analyze in depth. Save for where I cut them to focus in on the content of choice, all clips examined throughout this thesis are otherwise unaltered. The summary I provide below of the Birthing scene relies on the visual content of the clip, rather than the dialogic content, as this chapter will be devoted to examining how narrative can shift over the same visual components.
Corrupting Narrative Frames
The Birthing scene begins with a black screen and a burst of bubbles through water, breath released from the depths and rising. Black nothing fades into an empty blue expanse, watery reflections, and a meadow of reeds. A Pokémon flits past, cat-like and pink, and the animation cuts to a rush of water and bubbles before bursting above surface for an establishing shot of green trees and snow-capped mountains against a background of bright blue sky. It is a flicker of free and gloriously untouched wild, one which cuts to a reflection of leafy branches and grey stone on rippling water, an upside-down world turned orange in the sunset light.
The orange haze fades to black, which is interrupted by more bubbles. The bubbles are at first clear and crisp, then misshapen and opaque. An eye opens, taking up the entirety of the
frame before the angle switches. The eye’s vision is blurred by liquid and glass, human figures easing slowly into focus before fading once more into the gloom as the eye closes.
It is then that a Pokémon appears, its body held in stasis by sensory wires within a glass tube filled with orange liquid. It is an alien thing, knees curled up and arms crossed over its armored chest with a thick tail swept behind its horned head. As its eye slowly opens once more, the scene cuts back to the mountain reflection, the watery ripples, the creature in the reeds before, at last, a blue glow lights the black pupil. The glass of the incubation tube breaks in a show of bizarre and frightening telepathic strength, sensory cords ripping apart and orange fluid spilling out onto the floor in rivers.
The human scientists, no longer obscured by the tank’s insulating glass and liquid, rush to confront their creature, their creation, and as the Pokémon raises his head, liquid clings to his purple skin. They speak, human Dr. Fuji and Pokémon Mewtwo, of his progenitor, Mew, a framed photograph of an ancient carving looming in the background of their contrasting silhouettes. Their profiles stand in opposition to one another through empty incubation tubes. Human eyes remain shadowed, ambiguous and almost sinister, as the scientists eagerly speak among themselves, leaving Mewtwo to contemplate his three-fingered hands with narrowed violet eyes. As the cacophony of voices grows louder, a blue glow wreathes the Pokémon and blazes in his eyes.
Orange tubes crack and shatter, one by one, as Mewtwo rises into the air to fling back the humans with a wave of psychic power. He destroys the mechanical arms attempting to contain him, explodes machines and ruptures pipelines with a brilliant blue glare, and engulfs the laboratory in flames. Dr. Fuji, collapsed against a wall, bears witness to his creation, surrounded by fire and the blue of Mewtwo’s power, before the screen cuts to ominous white.
As I have attempted to highlight with my summary, the Birthing is rich in visual detail. It also presents the opportunity to analyze two vastly different methods of how this film’s core narrative could be interpreted. Pokémon: The First Movie is an illustration of the dualistic conflict between clones and the natural-born Pokémon, but the motivations behind Mewtwo starting this conflict rely entirely on which version of the Birthing’s dialogue is received and where in the film the scene appears.
Table 1
J Version 10.55 – 11.45 A Version 0.18 – 1.08
Mewtwo
Where is this? Who am I?
Mewtwo
I’ve always been dreaming about this world which doesn’t exist in my memory*.
Narrator
Life. The great miracle and the great mystery.
Mewtwo
(whispering) Who am I?
Narrator
Since the beginning, humans and Pokémon alike have searched for its meaning.
Mewtwo
Who are you? Wait!
Mewtwo
I will never forget that world where I saw that creature flying.
Mewtwo
(whispering) What am I?
Narrator
Many strange and wondrous legends evolved from the pursuit of life’s mysteries.
Mewtwo
(whispering) Where am I?
Narrator
But none is stranger than this tale of the most powerful Pokémon of all.
Mewtwo
(whispering) I am ready to be…
What should be noted immediately is that A Version incorporates an omniscient narrator, one which is not present in J Version. This may be attributed to the fact that A Version begins with the Birthing, and so the narrator is employed to set up the film’s premise for American viewers who have not been afforded Mewtwo’s adolescent experiences with Aitwo or Dr. Fuji’s tragic reasons behind his involvement in the Mew cloning project. This initial narration already sets the tone of the upcoming Birthing scene in a way quite different from what was received by viewers of J Version. For one, the audience has no way of establishing a timeline for this montage. It could be taking place in the distant past, in which case the narration predicts a story of the future, or in the distant future, with the narrator recounting something of legend, or even in the present. Rather than provide any concrete details, the narration focuses on the larger, more grandiose theme of life as a mystery and frames the film as an exposé on how that mystery is unraveled and distorted by one Pokémon in particular. Not just any Pokémon, either, but “the most powerful Pokémon of all.” This emphasis encourages viewers to expect a story of legendary proportions, especially with the preceding revelation that the story they are about to witness is a “strange” one. The whispered voice also goes unnamed and unacknowledged by the narrator, despite the curious questions it puts forward: who, what, where?
In addition, as can be seen in Table 1, the English-language narration takes over space that, in J Version, has been left silent or devoted to an adult Mewtwo’s thoughts, which are repetitions of his earlier existential confusion experienced with Aitwo and the starter Pokémon clones. Gayatri Spivak makes note of a similar disparity in her analysis of Bengali poetry by Mahasweta, stating that “if the two translations are read side by side, the loss of the rhetorical silences of the original can be felt from one to the other” (183). The lack of dialogue in J Version
is literally filled by the narrator’s presence, similar to how gaps in conversation can be filled with awkward interjections. This is not to suggest that the presence of a narrator is awkward; indeed, the need to provide a narrative framework with the narrator of A Version stems from the deliberate omission of footage and dialogue that is provided in J Version, an issue not uncommon to most translations. However, the inclusion of such narrative text, the construction of a framework that otherwise did not exist, informs us that A Version leans heavily on organized structure as a backbone for the film in ways that J Version does not. The silence visible in J Version’s script allows for the audience to establish their own expectations for the film, or not. There are no directions. A Version purposefully lays out for the audience a set of goals to expect from the film: the uncovering of a mystery and, as a result, a potential conflict with an all-powerful Pokémon.
In contrast, J Version viewers have already had about ten minutes of footage to familiarize themselves with the voice of Mewtwo, who provides the only vocal overtones heard in this clip. The line which I have marked with an asterisk should be particularly poignant for viewers, as they are already aware that Mewtwo has lost all memory of his adolescence due to being sedated. He speaks with a palpable solemnity which is then interrupted by a surprised exclamation at the appearance of what viewers know to be Mew, recognizable from an earlier sequence with the scientists who first discovered the genetic material from which Mewtwo was cloned. Mewtwo’s understanding that there is an Other, someone not him, and his instinctive cry —“Who are you? Wait!”—implies a longing for connection, and Mew’s disappearance into the distance reflects his detachment from even the images of his own dreams. The next line of Mewtwo’s monologue pushes the somber tone of his remarks into a sort of wistfulness, a promise that he will never forget this place and this creature—his ancestor—which he himself has never known. It speaks to a loneliness that neatly continues J Version’s already-established narrative of loss and crisis of being, reflected in the amount of empty space, representative of silence, seen in the J Version column of Table 1 in comparison to A Version’s column.
Rather than creating a strong thematic framework upon which viewers can build expectations, Mewtwo’s monologue in J Version builds an empathic narrative frame and reads more like the recounting of a dream, rendering it more of an experience in which viewers can share rather than A Version’s prologue-like opening narration. Without a narrator to direct attention, viewers are left to commiserate with Mewtwo’s sense of confusion and loneliness which is otherwise absent from A Version. Another key difference is A Version’s deliberate emphasis on the strange tale’s main subject being the “most powerful Pokémon of all.”12
Mewtwo’s capabilities, at this point presumably in battle with other Pokémon, becomes an established and central characteristic to him even before A Version viewers have had the chance to meet him. J Version Mewtwo’s small monologue focuses entirely on his insecurity, his uncertainty of who and what he is rather than his abilities.
12 I am taking the position that the most powerful Pokémon referenced by the narrator is Mewtwo rather than Mew, the ancestor Pokémon, due to Mewtwo’s being in direct conflict with A Version’s human protagonists. His power is important to emphasize as it makes him all the more terrifying an antagonist.
In her article “Politics of Translation,” Spivak asks the question, “What is it that you are making accessible?” (191). What purpose does the translation (not) serve, and I would add to that: what does it enhance or diminish in order to make that objective visible? Table 1 shows that very little is actually translated between J Version and A Version, and even the questions the two Versions share differ in their importance. J Version’s Mewtwo’s desire to know himself and the Other (Mew) has been replaced by A Version’s parallel desire to know what he is, as I have indicated in the highlighted lines on Table 1. Even this desire, though, has been suppressed beneath the omniscient narrator’s lines. This suggests, from the start, that Mewtwo as a character is less important than what he represents within the framework laid down by the narrator’s exposition. The narrator himself, being the dominant voice in A Version, is also a human voice and implies the familiar human-guided hierarchy of the Pokémon franchise. In this fantasy world, humans are also the only ones purported to be capable of speech, thereby ruling Mewtwo out as the narrator from the start in A Version. It is not obvious, either, from this initial montage that he is the Pokémon our narrator refers to as the “most powerful Pokémon of all”. Mewtwo’s minimal presence reduces, if not eliminates, the audience’s emotional attachment to his critical existential predicament and overlays it with a script about the as-yet undiscovered meaning of life itself.
However, this grandiosity is almost necessary in A Version. Because the ten minutes of footage detailing Mewtwo’s adolescence and traumatic experience with the death of his only friends were cut from the A Version film, a direct translation of J Version, as seen above in Table 1, would accomplish very little in terms of preparing a narrative premise for A Version audiences. Mewtwo as narrator would detract from any solid narrative because Mewtwo himself is not yet a solid character, and this ambiguity in J Version only works because the audience has followed Mewtwo through growth and great loss. To make up for that lack, A Version is afforded the opportunity to, in a way, start the entire film from scratch. Where direct translation fails, creative adaptation can step up to fill the void. Rather than casting this failure as such, Gary Bortolotti and Linda Hutcheons liken the multidirectional process of adapting narratives in cultural exchanges to the process of adaptation experienced in the natural world:
“When species find themselves in a novel environment—and if it is one where there are few competitors and many opportunities—they may further diversify and adapt to novel ecological roles… In a like manner a narrative can proliferate when it finds novel opportunities in new media. This can lead to a diversifying of the narrative unit into different narratives eventually” (451-52).
It can be said that the A Version clip described in column two of Table 1 has been set into a novel environment—that of an American viewership—and was required to diversify in order to fit that new environment. This required shedding of elements that, while present and vital in J Version, would cause significant harm to its success, and as such, translators endeavored to prune them away and replace them. This pruning and replacement results in A Version’s new narrative framework and its accompanying omniscient narrator. The audience is watching the film, but it is not part of Mewtwo’s struggle due to the distance narration creates.
