>>51431314No. Sugimori said otherwise in an interview and it's talked about in the manga as well. Sugimori designed Pokémon as friendly beasts and thus used real animals as the main inspiration for Pokémon, which is still true to this day. Tajiri was pushing for much friendlier looking designs and that's why they also hired 3 other artists.
>>51431285I believe that panel describes the shift in attitude towards Pokémon. Tajiri in his mind imagines Pokémon as being more like animals than monsters in his mind, creating two separate spheres for Pokémon, that being the wild and domestic. People here get mad at me when I compare Pokémon to dogs but you have the man who came up with the concept doing as such. This why Pokémon in the domesticated sphere take up heavily after real domesticated animals like dogs, from the food they eat in the anime, to their actions in the games like barking and chewing random things, to even the players interaction with them like playing fetch. Pokémon at their core are dogs, they're modeled after creatures that are naturally affectionate towards humans. This also coincides with what Shudo talked about in his blog about the development of the early anime such as being adamant that Pokémon were the only animals in the Pokémon universe, being told that ghost Pokémon have nothing to do with ghost, this strips ghost Pokémon of their mystifying elements, and him saying that he couldn't use real animals as part of a gag because there was no equivalent. To me this all shows what I've been saying all along, Pokémon are fantastical critters and this manga, Shudo's blog and the 2012 guide all tell us this from behind the scenes.
