Let's Talk About Pokemon - Celebi

Stinky hat.

251: Celebi

Hey, it's Joe!

Celebi is more or less settling in yet another trend that the series will hang onto for the longest time; a Psychic type "Mythical" Pokemon that serves as an analog to Mew. Celebi is a decent enough follow-up, being a nature spirit that hides in the forest. Fitting, with how Johto has a much bigger focus on nature than Kanto did, the latter being based on a very urbanized region of Japan while Johto is based on a much more traditional region.

Celebi is cute, and it's nice that onion fairy has some insect-like aspects to it like a pair of antennae and bug-like wings. It also has time travel powers, for some reason, but hey. It's one of those just-plain-cute kind of designs that has just enough of an oddity to it to still make it intriguing, especially those long arms.

Personal Score: 7/10

You thought the review was over? Well we'll detour to talk about... THIS thing real quick.

For the uninitiated, this thing appeared in one of the anime's movies. Obviously, Pokemon 4 Ever, the one that starred Celebi. The basic plot being some poacher is going around fucking things up by catching Pokemon in "Dark Balls", a Poke Ball that apparently just makes Pokemon act nasty for some reason. Shadow Pokemon before Shadow Pokemon we guess. So in order to fuck things up even harder, the dude catches Celebi in a Dark Ball, to which Celebi creates THIS thing in its rampage.

It's not actually Celebi but rather a shambling mass of vines and tree branches with Celebi hiding inside of it. So it's not an actual Pokemon but it's still such a HAUNTING design that's sad it's never been represented in the games in any way. This thing, despite being made of extremely obvious CGI, was up there as one of the things that scared me most as a kid, with its soulless face and ragged tree-branch "wings". If anything it being uncannily CGI just made it scarier in my kid-brain.

It's just such a good dark corruption of Celebi too, with it having the long arms, a pair of wings and more or less the same-shape head. Even with the antennae! Perhaps against the spirit of Celebi since it just goes around destroying the forest, but even then the concept of a living natural disaster is also just cool. Godzilla and all his kaiju buddies made it cool. Sin from FFX made it cool. It's just cool! May just be some liberties the writers and/or artists took for Celebi but still.

We won't score it since it's not in official canon or anything, but DAMN.

DAMN.

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