Review:

I hesitate to even call this a movie. There is a beginning and an end, but in between is almost a clip show and not a real story. I Choose You! is the first movie in (what is apparently being called) the alternate Timeline series and it re-imagines bits of the Indigo League season into an hour and a half movie. I won't spoil which moments we see, because saying "Hey! I remember that!" is literally the only fun to be had with this film. There is no coherent story and the characters are barely more than placeholders. The voice acting isn't great either. Why is Ash given what is clearly a woman's voice? There are tons of great female voice actors that can do a convincing 10 year-old boy voice (or they could just get a boy to do it). The movie just doesn't jive with Pokemon lore(?) either. They open with Ash watching a battle between two trainers having a Pokemon battle, but one is using a Pokemon who is weak against the type of the other Pokemon and that seems to be entirely irrelevant to the battle. A Blastoise and a Venusaur, and grass moves are hitting Blastoise just as hard as water moves hit Venusaur. The strength and weakness system is totally ignored the entire movie. The three legendary dogs all appear separately in the movie, even after they took the time to tell us that they are incredibly rare. Ash fights a fire Pokemon with a Fire Pokemon. Team Rocket show up from time to time, but have zero impact in the story. My biggest problem, though, is just how disorienting the story is. Ash gets his second Pokemon and then we jump to him getting his third badge. The time line is so inconsistent and so much happens between scenes that each time we get a new one, it takes a bit to establish where we are in the story. They obviously cut out the vast majority of what happens in Indigo League, but they really needed to cut out even more and focus on one specific plot line. The movie was just terrible. I can't even say the animation was good, as it gets jumpy and the animation style isn't constant. The only thing that I can see any Pokemon fan enjoying is the small bits from the original show. Anyone not a Pokemon fan has no reason to watch this. It's so boring and the plot is more like Cliffs Notes book-ended by small plot events. For the love of Pokemon, I recommend you avoid this movie at all costs. I hated Detective Pikachu, but I'd rather watch that twice than have to deal with this again.