The Pokemon franchise has a long history of featuring its Legendary and Mythical creatures in movies set throughout the anime canon. In the build-up to Pokemon The Movie: Coco, set to release this June in Japan, the partial silhouette of a new Mythical Pokemon was unveiled by CoroCoro magazine yesterday, and now the full thing has been posted online.
This addition to the pantheon of Mythical Pokemon, whose appearance seems to blend tiger-like features with a sort of primate build, has a lot of visual similarities to the outfit worn by a human character Ash Ketchum and his trusty Pikachu will encounter in a jungle during the film. Fansites like PokeBeach.com, where the silhouette appears to have been first released, also point out that the thirty-second trailer for the movie features a baby version of the jungle-dwelling character and the shrine used by Celebi in 2001's Pokemon 4Ever.
According to the CoroCoro magazine spread, the mysterious new Pokemon will be fully revealed on Pokemon Day, February 27, which will mark the 24th anniversary of when the franchise came to be. A poll looking for the most popular Pokemon has also been set up to celebrate Pokemon Day, and is preparing to close tomorrow.
The new Mythical Pokemon will also be coming to Pokemon Sword and Shield on the Nintendo Switch at some point in the future. It will be joining a host of creatures appearing in the Galar Region thanks to the Sword and Shield Expansion Pass, which was announced during a Nintendo Direct early last month.
As previously mentioned, Pokemon has a history of doing movie tie-ins to promote special Pokemon: Celebi in Pokemon 4Ever, Arceus in 2009's Arceus and the Jewel of Life, and multiple Kalos representatives in 2016's Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel among them. The practice dates back to the original 1998 movie, which has a CGI remake called Pokemon: Mewtwo Strikes Back - Evolution being released on Netflix for Pokemon Day.
Though Sword and Shield were originally criticized for removing a chunk of the National Pokedex, that complaint has in-part been mitigated by the reveal that more Pokemon will be added into the game over time. With Pokemon Home now available to store the huge catalog of monsters in, fans of the series will just have to wait and see how this new Mythical Pokemon will fit into their collections.
Source: PokeBeach.com