Pokémon: The Rise Of Darkrai

ポケットモンスターダイヤモンド＆パールディアルガVSパルキアVSダークライ (Pokemon Movie 10: Dialga vs. Palkia vs. Darkrai)

7.3(77,970)

MAL Score

Ranked #2977

Popularity #2059

Action
Adventure
Comedy
Drama
Fantasy

Episodes: 1
Duration: 1 hr 30 min
Aired: Jul 15, 2007
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

In Alamos Town, the elegant Space-Time Towers—century-old landmarks designed by the architect Godey to fill the area with orchestral music—stand at the heart of the city. Satoshi, Hikari, and Takeshi arrive as part of their Sinnoh journey, heading for the Alamos Town Contest Hall. They’re welcomed by a local woman named Alice and her partner Chimchar, who gladly shows them the town’s sights.

The visit takes a sudden turn when Alice’s friend Tonio detects a surge of dimensional anomalies spreading across Alamos. Suspicion quickly falls on the shadowy Pokémon Darkrai, but the disturbances worsen as the legendary Dialga and Palkia emerge and clash, sealing the town and everyone inside it away from the outside world in a separate dimension.

With the crisis escalating, Tonio uncovers that the catastrophe was anticipated long ago—and that his great-grandfather left behind a possible means to end the conflict. Satoshi and his friends must rely on that final option to keep Alamos Town from being erased between dimensions.

Otaku Consensus

The Rise of Darkrai earns its durable reputation by letting Kunihiko Yuyama frame a Pokémon movie as an apocalyptic civic disaster, with Shinji Miyazaki’s music and the Dialga/Palkia/Darkrai collision giving the film a scale fans still single out. The recurring complaint is structural: the central conflict can feel like an overlong, logic-strained set-piece, so the movie lands best as operatic spectacle and a melancholy Darkrai showcase rather than as airtight fantasy plotting.

Why You Should Watch

If you want a Pokémon film that treats its theatrical canvas like disaster fantasy rather than an extended TV episode, The Rise of Darkrai is the cleanest Diamond and Pearl-era pick. It scratches the same itch as Pokémon 2000's legendary-scale spectacle and Lucario and the Mystery of Mew's sympathy for an outcast Pokémon, but with a stronger emphasis on civic architecture, music, and time-space panic. Kunihiko Yuyama's direction keeps the child-cast accessibility intact while staging the set-pieces as collapsing geography rather than simple arena brawls. Viewers who like franchise mythology, orchestral motifs, and a darker guardian figure will get more from it than viewers looking for tight sci-fi logic or comedy-first Pokémon comfort food.

Key Characters

A
Alice(VA: Mamiko Noto)
Alice works because Mamiko Noto gives the local guide role a calm musical warmth, making her feel tied to Alamos Town's identity rather than just exposition.
B
Baron Alberto(VA: Kouichi Yamadera)
Baron Alberto is the film's loud comic counterweight, and Kouichi Yamadera's performance turns his vanity into a deliberately theatrical disruption.
D
Darkrai(VA: Kouji Ishizaka)
Darkrai is remembered less as a standard movie monster than as a silent, wounded presence whose reputation drives much of the film's tension.
H
Hikari(VA: Megumi Toyoguchi)
Hikari brings Diamond and Pearl energy into the film, grounding the larger mythic material in the contest-era personality of the TV series.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
This is Pokémon Movie 10 and the first theatrical entry of the Diamond and Pearl/Sinnoh period, reflected by Hikari's main-character billing and the movie's focus on then-new fourth-generation mythic stakes.
2
OLM's production leans into large-scale spatial distortion rather than the travelogue structure of many Pokémon features; AniList's 60% CGI tag also signals how noticeable the digital elements are in the spectacle.
3
The audio package is unusually central: Masafumi Mima is credited as sound director and Shinji Miyazaki as composer, while the town's landmark music concept gives the score an in-world function instead of merely underscoring action.
4
Key animation credits include Masaaki Iwane and Hideo Hariganeya, with Youichi Kotabe as animation supervisor, connecting the film's action-heavy sequences to names familiar to long-running Pokémon animation followers.
5
Its reception profile is stable rather than cult-obscure: MAL lists a 7.33 from 77,970 votes, while AniList records 71/100 and 336 favourites, matching the web consensus of being worth watching despite inconsistencies.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The film retains top-level franchise lineage in its credits: Satoshi Tajiri is listed as original creator and Ken Sugimori as original character designer.
Fun fact 2: Baron Alberto is voiced by Kouichi Yamadera, a prolific anime and film actor whose casting gives a comic aristocrat one of the movie's most recognizable Japanese voice credits.
Fun fact 3: Alice is voiced by Mamiko Noto, whose soft-spoken register contrasts with the movie's otherwise high-volume legendary conflict.
Fun fact 4: In the database credits, Darkrai has Kouji Ishizaka listed as its Japanese voice actor, while Dialga's voice actor is not identified.
Fun fact 5: Fan and critic write-ups repeatedly note the tonal split: one discussion called parts of it sad and worth the runtime, while a later review criticized it as an excessively long fight scene with shaky logic.