Love these ladies. Femme fatale characters rarely come two for the price of one, and all too often, female villains exist only as the slightly-less-evil subordinates of male villains (to whom they are implied to be attracted four times out of five). Annie and Oakley just steal shit for fun and profit.
I’m pretty fond of Butler (and not just because he’s a cute ex-Magma). He’s quite fleshed out for a one-shot antagonist (flashbacks! backstory! a girlfriend!), and his character growth in the film is such that you could have completely removed Ash and company and it would have done nothing except make the film better. Granted, I’m contractually obligated to say that about everything, but I think you could literally have erased Ash, May, Brock, and Max from the script and it would have barely affected the plot, because all of the character development happens with Butler.
I had always heard that this movie was the worst of all the Pokémon movies, so I was surprised when I sat down to watch it and it sucked no harder than the others (in my opinion). I like Vicious. He’s not a good person who’s been misguided or corrupted–he’s just a terrible human being, plain and simple. I respect that.
I think I might do some little capspams of the movie villains, it being their turn on Theory Thursday and all. Marcus isn’t one of my favorites, necessarily, but I like the way he’s animated.
A couple of people have questioned whether this or that movie villain survived the end of their film, and the answer is always “yes.” The rule of thumb seems to be to kill them off for real in the manga adaptation, and to leave it ambiguous in the film itself but then show them alive in the credits (if not of their own film, then of the next one). I scraped together this illustrative screencap collection for reference/reassurance. Left to right, top to bottom:
- Annie and Oakley in prison, reading a book about Lawrence III
- Butler and Diane in Forina (background)
- Captain Phantom and Galen sharing a prison cell
- Newton Graceland visiting Zero in prison, showing him a surviving copy of Infi
- Marcus working the land behind Damos
- Kodai and Goone being carted off to prison
Jazz version of the Team Rocket hideout music from RBY. I’m guessing this is what plays in the elevators at Team Rocket HQ.
