>>53185148I reawathed the film with some friends last year, and I can confirm it isn't exactly a masterpiece. The animation was essentially a slightly higher budged version of the TV anime, the plot is barebones though fine for what it is, and there's a couple of outright bad design choices, most notably the decision to put some cheesy pop song on the background of what should be a dramatic fight scene, and an attempt to force a "making pokemon battle is bad" moral when battling pokemon is literally half of what the whole franchise is built around, the other being catching pokemon, (it would've made more sense if the moral was that by treating the clone pokemon as expendable battling-machines and not caring about their wellbeing Mewtwo was doing the very same thing he resented the humans for doing to him)
Let's be honest, if you aren't a pokemon fan you aren't going to get much out of the film, and the reason kids went to loved it was because it was Pokemon in the movie theatres, not because it was good. And Tbh that's fine. They didn't set out to make the next Studio Ghibli film but a cashgrab tie-in to the most profitable videogames franchise in the world, and they accomplished what they set out to do.
