According to the Internet Movie Database, the actual title of this film was Poketto monsutaa: Maboroshi no Pokemon X: Lugia bakudan, and it was released in 1999 (presumably in Japan). Now it’s out in the USA as Pokémon: The Movie 2000. The first Pokémon movie, released here last year, did claim there would be a sequel; some critics considered that a promise, others called it a threat. Now the sequel has made U.S. shores and (despite hordes of young viewers crowding their way into our theater) for this weekend it seems to be third in the net profit list, after What Lies Beneath and -Men. Maybe that’s because of the cheaper ticket prices for the movie’s main clientele.

The movie is actually presented in two independent parts. The first, maybe 10-15 minutes long, is Pikachu’s Rescue Mission, and has the usual batch of Pokémon wandering around in the wilderness, encountering other Pokémon , and not doing much of anything against a second-rate animation environment. A few minutes into this one, I had already decided that “threat” was the right term for this release.

Fortunately, the second part, the biggie, is a lot better, with superior animation and a story line that, if it doesn’t always make sense, actually takes you from here to there with a lot of action. A big-time Pokémon collector, apparently tired of buying trading cards, intends to capture three important Pokémon living in the Orange Island Archipelago, and use them to capture Lukia (Lugia, if you prefer), an undersea Pokémon whose nature is to mediate struggles between the other three. Unfortunately, removing any one of these Pokémon from the wild will cause a shift in global climate that will lead to all sorts of natural meteorological disasters; removing all of them would be catastrophic on a planetary scale. And, of course, young pokemon trainer Ash Ketchum, Pikachu, and all their friends, human and pokemon, happen to be travling in the Orange Islands just at the right — or wrong — time. For Ash, because it turns out he is the only person who can save the world — all this while two girls fight over which one isn’t his girlfriend.

I don’t know how many afternoon episodes of this program I’ve heard because David had the living room TV on while I was sitting at my computer doing e-mail or whatever; but, surprise! I didn’t know any of the characters to recognize except by their voices (except for Pikachu, whose doll image seems to be everywhere, including at my workplace). It was actually something of a pleasure to see them all in action — and also to meet the evil but, fortunately, very incompetent Team Rocket, who, however, for once decide to do something on the side of good instead of on the side of potential profit.

I expected to have a wasted couple of hours when I went to see this film. Except for the first few minutes, it was actually something of a pleasant surprise.

Note: in the trailers we got a look at Fox’s forthcoming Pokémon ripoff, Digimon. Perhaps more interesting was the preview for something called The Little Vampire, about a small boy, a family of vampires whom he befriends, a seedy-looking Fearless Vampire Hunter, and a whole herd of red-eyed cows who hang around in their barn from the rafters by their back hooves. Now that’s a kids’ movie I’m looking forward to.