Old school nostalgia meets modern day noir.
As massive Pokémon fans, we were incredibly excited to work on Detective Pikachu. As the film’s creatures are largely CGI, director Rob Letterman thought it would be a great idea to use the end titles to pay homage to Pokémon’s origins, and we agreed!
Inspired by 1990s Japanese serialized manga covers, we set to work illustrating the film’s human characters and their pocket monster counterparts in a style reminiscent of Ken Sugimori’s original game art direction. All designs were reviewed and approved by The Pokémon Company and were then animated in the sequence itself.
Additionally, our work on the main titles utilized a font designed to combine the aesthetic of both the Roman alphabet and Japanese characters, much like Ryme City’s own look in the film.