Did everyone else already know about Pokearth? Am I the last to discover this astonishing combination of nature documentary and Pokémon? Just in case, I need to make sure you’ve seen them too, because wow. For the last few months, YouTuber EnlargedKai has been making lifelike CG-animated videos that perfectly spoof BBC nature docs, but with a superbly deadpan face.
You may remember late last year we mentioned a similar project being created by Tiktoker Elious. It seems he now has competition, with lengthier, spoofier approaches to a similar idea.
This all began in February this year, when—after a couple of animation tests—EnlargedKai uploaded “Life of a Clodsire.” The 9th-gen Pokémon, the evolved form of the Paldean Wooper, is a brilliantly peculiar choice to start with, eschewing the more drearily obvious candidates, and perfectly sets up the pastiche of those David Attenborough documentaries that have been made for decades.
The short film, as well as being fantastically well-animated (although you can already see the enormous progression made over the last eight months in the most recent video), hits every beat of those British BBC docs. With what’s presumably an AI David Attenborough voice explaining that the muddy climes are the perfect place to raise their young, it then moves into a walrus-style battle between two male Clodsire over a mate. The two rather pathetically flop against one another, before the slapping begins, until—as always happens in these docs—the invading male retreats, defeated, and our hero maintains his ground.
The second film is perhaps a more obvious pick, but it’s impossible to begrudge. Because it’s Magikarp. This time taking aim at a more National Geographic-style approach, the narration begins with the perfect line, “A little further west of Kanto lies a forest enclave, hidden from human interference.” The shot cuts from water spilling over a small fall to the pool below, where a few Surskit stand on the surface, the focus pulling from the fall to the little blue Pokémon, before cutting to a close-up with a Magikarp under the water behind it.
The degree of observation that’s going on here, the knowledge of how nature docs are edited such that it’s delivered with accuracy, rather than lampoonery, makes these videos all the better. This video, “Life of a Magikarp,” is spoofing the very familiar format of salmon swimming upstream to spawn, and so yes, of course, at the falls there are Ursaring waiting to catch the fish as they make their journey. And of course we get all those slo-mo shots of the Magikarp leaping as Pidgey swoop down and catch them in their talons. Again, it’s just perfect.
Come the third, EnlargedKai demonstrates a stellar leap forward in rendering fur. (I was being polite, but those Ursaring looked a bit plastic.) This time we’re spoofing arctic episodes of your favorite documentary, and the cute pups that like to play in the snow. But here it’s Spheal, and his mother Walrein. And yup, it makes sure to mention that the mother’s milk is 70 percent fat, for a “thick layer of blubber.”
But you’ll never guess what! Their curiosity lands them in trouble, and that can get pretty serious in the harsh blizzards…
It’s with this edition that EnlargedKai does something very important—they start to incorporate nuances of the world of Pokémon into the videos, rather than just one-for-one mimicking real-world animals. So here we see the traditional story of the seals getting stuck on a drifting ice floe, but here it’s Spheal on a drifting Avalugg, and the resulting behaviors thereof.
Which brings us to the most recent video, uploaded this week, starring the wonderful Wailord. Here, EnlargedKai appears to be testing themselves, going for a furry but aquatic creature, with some amazing splishy splashy water effects throughout. As you might hope, it features those shots of leaping out of the sea and crashing back down.
And, best of all, while it takes aim at yet another nature documentary trope—the whale that eats from vast schools of tiny fish—the results are unique to Pokémon’s reality. Here, the Wailord are preying on a huge, swirling vortex of Wishiwashi, and without ever explaining, the commentary alludes to what such Pokémon are capable of, and why the Wailord needs to work quickly. (Wishiwashi, for those free of such knowledge, can take on a School Form in which they become a large, predatory fish.) The only thing missing here is Wingull circling above to pick off the remains.
EnlargedKai has a Patreon to support the project, where backers can vote for which Pokémon will be featured next, although they say the pace will slow down now as they’re back at college following the summer. We’ve reached out to EnlargedKai to ask a few questions about the project, and will update should they reply.
.
Leave a Reply