Detective Pikachu & The Mystery of the Missing Flan - Animated Short Review

Why does Pokémon keep releasing these shorts on a short notice? I was only informed Detective Pikachu & the Mystery of the Missing Flan had gone out after I saw it come up in my subscription box on Youtube. So, I sat down and decided to watch it and… it was adorable. Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching Ron Kamonohashi’s Forbidden Deductions lately, but I’ve really fallen for the mystery genre recently. Maybe it’s the reason why I enjoyed this short so much.

Detective Pikachu & the Mystery of the Missing Flan is very short and simple. It’s basically just Detective Pikachu and Tim Goodman trying to solve the mystery of Tim’s missing flan, which had been in the refrigerator yet it disappeared within hours. While Tim had initially pinned Munchlax as the culprit, its only crime turned out to be stealing Tim's banana. The way the duo used observation and gathered clues to find the culprit was nice to see. It’s simple and to the point, which is exactly what you need for something this short.

The animation in this short seemed a bit different from the games. Pikachu and Munchlax look like they’re handmade plushies, while Tim Goodman looks just a bit different than he does in the game. I thought Applin looked the best though, honestly. It’s not plushy, but rather it looks kind of like a ceramic apple. I think it fit well with a rather simple short like this, and I’d like to see more shorts animated similar to how this one was.

I don’t know all that much about the world of Detective Pikachu, but I can see the character's personalities well from this short alone. Detective Pikachu is confident. Tim is a bit short-tempered and quick to assumptions. For those more familiar with the game, do you feel that this captured how they are canonically?

I actually watched this short in three languages: English, Japanese and Korean; and the voice acting for all three languages was really good. For the English dub, the cast of the duo is the same as the game. Pikachu is voiced by Kaiji Tang and Tim is voiced by Khoi Dao. The Japanese dub though actually gave the duo different voice actors from their game counterparts. In the games, Pikachu was voiced by Toru Okawa, but for this short, he’s voiced by Koichi Yamadera, a rather familiar name seen playing a variety of characters across the Pokémon anime movies, perhaps most notably Sir Aaron in Lucario and the Mystery of Mew. Tim meanwhile was voiced by Yuma Uchida in the games, but he’s voiced by Yuto Uemura for the shorts. It's not clear why these changes were made, when Pokémon typically tries to retain the same voice actor when they're portraying the same version of a character in different media.

I do wonder if there will be more of the Detective Pikachu shorts. I certainly hope they make more, with this one being so fun to watch! After much convincing from my friend, I actually recently bought the first Detective Pikachu game for the 3DS, and having seen this short, I can’t wait to play it and learn more about these characters! Overall, what are your thoughts on this short? Do you want to see Pokémon release more like these in future?