Yellow Fever

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu I Ryan Reynolds Gets Cute As The Most Unlikely Star Of The Roger Rabbit-esque Videogame Spin-off…

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As every Pokémon fan knows, the real thrill is in the hunt – even if it means chasing Ryan Reynolds from one country to the next so he can make Pikachu sound a bit sassier. “The post production on this film basically involves me following Ryan all over the world trying to get another few minutes of his time,” laughs director Rob Letterman, just back from tracking him down in Abu Dhabi.

Splitting his time between editing, special effects, commanding an army of animators and trying to get his main star to record all his unrehearsed ad-libs wearing a head-mounted facial capture camera, Letterman has his work cut out on Detective Pikachu.

“It’s been a wild ride,” he tells Teasers. “But it’s so complicated that I can’t even begin to describe it.” For Letterman, fresh from directing Goosebumps when he first started prepping the movie, the whole experience has been a labour of love that has almost nothing to do with being a Pokémon fan.

“I missed that whole craze growing up, but my kids are huge fans,” he says. “When I got the call asking if I was interested, my kids were actually in the room at the time and they started jumping up and down screaming, ‘You gotta do it! You gotta do it!’ So I kind of didn’t have much choice!”

Not that anyone needs to be a diehard fan to get into Detective Pikachu. Loosely based on the 2016 Nintendo 3DS spin-off game, the premise of the film is completely unrelated to anything that happened in the past seven generations of Poké-lore that spans comics, trading cards, videogames, TV shows and movies. The Pokémon still exist, and humans still catch and train them to fight, but the rest is somewhere between Blade Runner