Earlier today, Netflix released the second season of the stop motion animated series Pokémon Concierge to little fanfare. At just four episodes, making a whopping total of eight twenty-minute vignettes of life as an island resort for Pokémon, it’s easy to see why Pokémon Concierge is such a low-key project. This isn’t the expression of a dominant intellectual property in the gaming world and beyond as it gears up for a reimagining of the sixth-generation games (2013) in explicitly legendary terms. Pokémon Concierge is more…it feels like the kind of show PBS might have greenlit back in the nineties back when the licensing fees weren’t quite so high.
The generally peaceful vibe of Pokémon Concierge and its stop-motion animated style aren’t the only ways the show exudes a retro vibe. Pokémon Concierge calls to mind a very different era of Pokémon entirely, when the franchise wasn’t necessarily about paw-to-paw combat or catching them all. It reminds me a bit of old titles like Pokémon Snap, where gamers were perfectly happy just taking pictures of Pokémon in their natural, playful environment. Or the especially forgotten Pokémon Mini, a device filled with simple minigames where much of the satisfaction just came from all these cute, friendly-looking characters being nearby, blocky though they may have been.
There’s been a slow, steady march toward the epic in the Pokémon franchise since its initial inception in 1995. The fourth-generation games (2006) somewhat infamously introduced Arceus, the apparent God of the Pokémon universe, described as being responsible for all creation. Which fourth generation Pokémon is spotlighted in this season of Pokémon Concierge, you may be wondering? Why, Shinx and Luxray, of course. Shinx is cute and Luxray is tough, as has always been the case with evolutionary designs in this series. Yet in Pokémon Concierge, as resort guests, Shinx and Luxray are both equally placid and adorable.
Even their lightning powers, explicitly premised as dangerous, are portrayed here as functional. The formerly overworked protagonist of Pokémon Concierge, Haru, still has issues with her self-confidence in the second season. Yet despite this, we consistently see Haru rise to the occasion on the power of empathy alone. Even as the first episode climaxes with a crisis more typical of the Pokémon franchise as we know it, the resolution is…well, let’s just say it’s not really a resolution so much as a relaxation. Pokémon Concierge is, more than anything else, a show about trying to avoid conflict by just not letting it get to you. The Pokémon are there to help us relax, and they need to relax too.
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