The technological requisites in the post-production involved heavy usage of photorealistic CG animation and visual effects, comprising some 1550 shots, to bring the fictional cartoon and game characters into reality. The entire VFX team consisting of MPC, Framestore, Image Engine and Instinctual VFX, spent an entire year designing the characters before the filming even started.
About 60 Pokémon from the original series were recreated for the film. They started with the original 2D anime characters and video game models as a base. Next, they would find some real-world animal equivalents or as close as they could get. For Pikachu, for example, they looked at animals like bushbabies and lemurs. They would then take the skeletal structure of these animals and tweak it to fit the character's shape. In Pikachu's case, the skull needed to be enlarged and the limbs needed to be elongated. Once the structure was laid out, they would then add layers of fat and muscle. They studied the fur patterns on animals like rabbits to make them look more natural.
Since these characters are based on reality, they had to rely on real physics and specific proportions for the characters' movements. They grabbed clips of bulldog puppies frolicking and playing with each other, to animate the Bulbasaur creature to match that. Mewtwo was modeled to look like a muscular child, but his movements were heavily influenced by cats.
With Mr. Mime they used recognizable, synthetic materials to make up his form and to model his movements, they actually hired a real-life mime from New Zealand named Trygve Wakenshaw. Some of his scenes were rotoscoped from his actual performances.
Since Pikachu is the star of the film, they spent a lot of work on his facial features. In addition to voicing the character, Ryan Reynolds performed Pikachu’s expressions through facial motion capture. They attached a camera to Reynold’s head and captured 80 different expressions, comparing them to the cartoon Pikachu's range of emotions, which were very limited, and created a hybrid set. The non-talking voice of Pikachu was provided by Japanese actress Ikue Ôtani, who voices the Pikachu that appears in the long-running Pokémon anime series.
To get accurate reflections in the Pokémon's eyes, they also took 360-degree images of the set and mapped them back into the orbs.
When it came to the battle scene between Mewtwo and Pikachu, the animators made sure to stick to canon as much as possible for their move sets, each a recreation of the original moves but with more realistic flair influenced by smoke, plasma, and electricity.
They shot several takes with the puppets, for scenes with the fictional characters, so the actors had something to work with and so the animators can get a sense of important details like lighting and reflections. They would then use those takes and just paint the puppeteer out after. For some secondary characters, they just made texture balls with swatches of fur. Afterward, they would shoot clean takes without the puppets.
Another crucial factor in blending the characters with the real world was props. The team used a mix of both digital and practical objects. They had CG animals in the foreground or integrated into the background of a real environment. For the parade scene at the end, the team created real balloons and were prepared to raise them in the streets of London, but it was too windy, so they never got them off the ground. While you still see these semi-inflated props in a few shots, the rest are CGI.
Another challenging scene for the animators that mixed real props and CGI was the Torterra forest. Most of the first shots were filmed in a real valley in Scotland to set the scene, but they created massive rigs for the actors to move around on, which were later combined with CG.
They shot the movie on 35-millimeter film instead of digital to add a grittiness, and it was filmed on location in Scotland and England as much as possible "to ground the more surreal elements in a lived-in reality." Since it's a detective movie, Ryme City was given a noir feel, cool and dark colors with plenty of shadows and neon lights reflecting off wet streets.
The result of all these techniques and attention to detail kept the Pokémon true to their original form while at the same time immersing them in a new, more real-world for fans of the franchise to enjoy. The use of the film grain samples, the CG, and VFX elements blended so well with the live-action and really supported the gritty detective look of the story. Technically, they had some of the most high-end visual effects in the world, used in this movie, and the results look alive and completely photorealistic.
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