Every once in a while a revelation makes you feel like your whole life has been a lie. It's like when you realise Candy Shop by 50 Cent isn't actually about a confectionary store, or when you catch on a rewatch that the fishing rod with Barbie legs in Toy Story is meant to be a hooker. It's innocence lost. But these sorts of things don't always need to be adult topics that flew over your head as a child. Sometimes, your innocence can be broken by more innocence. Recently, Ken Sugimori's original Pokemon scans have been unearthed, showing that the colours we all grew up with were wrong from the star🐽t.
Even if you've never heard of Sugimori, you will have seen his work. The original Pokemon art was done by Sugimori, and for 25 years this🗹 work has been held up as the cornerstone of Pokemon designs. Things have moved on now, adding more detail, rounder eyes, humanoid Pokemon appear more frequently, and Legendaries have taken a more is more approach, but a lot can be traced back toও the archetypes put forward by Sugimori right at the start. But the colour has always been a particular point of debate, and now we know why.
Sugimori's art used lots of splashes of white within the Pokemon's colouration, and was famously discoloured on some of the most iconic Pokemon. For years, there has been a debate over why this style developed, why the anime and other art changed the colours to something brighter and bolder, and why Bulbasaur was blue. Now we have the answer - Bulbasaur was never blue at all. The discoloured pigments and the splashes of white were a combination of Sugimori's watercolour painting and low resolution scanning.
The original designs have been discovered, and those prominent splashes of white were actually colours, only applied lighter and more watered down in the paint. Likewise, Bulbasaur is green, not blue. Even Pokemon that were the right colour, like Charizard's orange, Pikachu's yellow, and Ditto's pink are far more vibrant and cartoonish on the high res versions than they are in the designs seared into my memory. Still, the 'new' designs trade one piece of charm for another. While they lack the distinct colours I still sharply associate with Pokemon, in the high res versions you can see blots of ink and places where the watercolour brush sweeps delicately outside the lines. These creatures were crafted by hand, and the workmanship shows in every drop of colour, high res or not.
In a way, it's a fitting origin for Pokemon - it didn't have the necessary tech or money to fully apply its vision. These days, it feels like things are reversed. Pokemon now lives on a console significantly more powerful than the original Game Boy, and is the most profitable franchise in the world - yet as we've seen with bugs, graphical downgrades, and a lack of fresh ideas and reinvention, something else is holding it back. For most people, their favourite Pokemon game is the one they loved as a kid, and there's an undeniable nostalgia attached to Sugimori's work for me. But it's also a reminder of a simpler time for the series.
The look of these low res scans is stitched so intricately into the fabric of Pokemon that the internet is full of fanart copycats and tributes, sketching their favourite modern 'mons in the Sugimori style, complete with patches of white everywhere and discolouration. It might have been a mistake, and I'm glad someone has found this lost slice of Pokemon history, but the original Pokemon will always look like Sugimori's low res paintings in my mind. Maybe deliberately choosing the inferior version coated in nostalgia over something more polished and bold tells you something about the mentality of the average Pokemon fan.