For Fans of Kunihiko Yuyama

Pokémon: Lucario and the Mystery of Mew (2005) is where Yuyama's instincts are at their sharpest. The premise is quietly audacious: a Pokemon who carries the memories of a knight who died serving a king, now confronting whether loyalty means anything when the person you served is gone. It handles grief with more delicacy than most films aimed at adults. If you want to understand what Yuyama is actually doing beneath the franchise surface, start here rather than with the first movie.

Pokémon: The First Movie should not work as well as it does. It is a 75-minute advertisement for a card game that opens with a sequence about a clone asking why it was born, and closes with the franchise's mascot weeping over a dead child. The film's central argument, that the circumstances of your birth do not determine your worth, is not handled with the most sophisticated filmmaking. But it is handled sincerely, and that sincerity has outlasted a lot of more technically accomplished films from the same period.

Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is the product of a collaboration between Level-5 and Studio Ghibli, but it captures something that Yuyama's films also reach for: the idea that the monster-filled world a child enters is not just an adventure but a mirror for the emotional crisis they can't face at home. The game's grief is real, its creature designs are genuinely strange, and its sense of wonder never turns smug. It belongs in the same conversation as anything Yuyama directed.

Pokémon 4Ever (2001) tends to get ranked near the bottom of the Yuyama filmography, largely because its CG Celebi has not aged well and its plot structure is looser than the movies around it. But the friendship at its center, between a boy and a small forest creature that has been hunted across time, is one of the most affecting in the series. The ending earns something the cleaner, better-structured films around it never quite reach. It is a strange, imperfect film and it is better than its reputation.