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Is Ash in the New Pokémon Movie? Why Pokémon: Wild Card Has No Ash

Pokémon's first movie in seven years has no Ash, no Liko and no Roy. Read the official announcement closely and Pokémon: Wild Card looks less like the movie series restarting than like the card game getting a film of its own.

By ABYSS CURRENT Editorial11 min readShare on X
Mikiya, the Pokémon TCG player at the centre of Pokémon: Wild Card, seen in close-up under a pale Mimikyu-like hood.
Official teaser asset: The Pokémon Company
In this article

Pokémon movies are back after years away — but not in the form many longtime fans expected.

Pokémon: Wild Card has no Ash. That much was obvious within minutes of the announcement. What has been discussed less is that it also has no Liko and no Roy, no OLM, no connection to the television series currently on air, and — going by The Pokémon Company's own materials — no particular interest in presenting itself as the twenty-fourth entry in a film series.

Read the official announcement closely and a different reading emerges. This does not look like the Pokémon movie series restarting after seven years. It looks like the Pokémon Trading Card Game being given a film of its own, in the year the card game turns 30.

CONFIRMED — as of September 1, 2026: the film, its 2027 worldwide rollout, its protagonist, its partner Pokémon and its core staff.

ABYSS CURRENT ANALYSIS: everything below about why this project exists in this shape is inference from official materials and public reaction. The Pokémon Company has not published a statement of intent, and no official source cited here says Ash has been retired from film.

What Pokémon Actually Announced

The teaser ran at the closing ceremony of the 2026 Pokémon World Championships in San Francisco, on August 31 Japan time. The Pokémon Company's president and CEO, Tsunekazu Ishihara, introduced it on stage.

The confirmed facts are narrow:

  • A feature-length animated film, Pokémon: Wild Card, rolling out worldwide from 2027.
  • The protagonist is Mikiya, a Pokémon Trading Card Game player. His partner is Mimikyu.
  • Director Katsuhiko Kitada, character designer Akemi Hayashi, animation production CloverWorks, planning and production STORY inc.
  • The Japanese press release states plainly that this is the first Pokémon film to take the Pokémon Trading Card Game as its subject, and that the card game reaches its 30th anniversary in October 2026.

Ishihara's on-stage description is worth reading for who it addresses. He said the protagonist is a Pokémon Card player working towards becoming a champion — like many of you here — and that the story would depict the passion players around the world carry. That is a description delivered to a room full of competitive players, about a character who is one of them.

We covered the announcement's collector angle separately, in our look at whether Wild Card will get a promo card. This piece is about a different question: why this project, and why now.

The shadows of a Pokémon TCG player and Mimikyu stretch across a lit floor in the Pokémon: Wild Card teaser.
The teaser never shows a Pokémon battle. It shows a player, a Mimikyu and a floor. The Pokémon Company

The Obvious Question: Where Is Ash?

For Japanese viewers of a certain age, "a new Pokémon movie" and "a Satoshi movie" were the same sentence for twenty-two years.

ORICON NEWS counts 23 Pokémon feature films from Mewtwo Strikes Back in 1998 to Coco in 2020, and notes that the protagonist was Satoshi in every one of them, matching the television anime. Satoshi's television story then ended on March 24, 2023, and Liko and Roy took over the series the following month.

Oricon's report also documents the expectation directly: among fans, it says, there had been calls for a Satoshi-led work at least in the movies — and the movies changed protagonist too.

  1. December 25, 2020The 23rd film, and the last one with AshPokémon the Movie: Coco opens in Japan. Animation by OLM, direction by Tetsuo Yajima. Every Pokémon feature film to that point had starred Satoshi — Ash.
  2. March 24, 2023Ash's television story endsThe final episode of Pokémon: Aim to Be a Pokémon Master airs in Japan, closing 26 years of Satoshi and Pikachu.
  3. April 14, 2023Liko and Roy take over the TV animeThe Horizons series begins with new leads. No Liko and Roy theatrical film has been announced since.
  4. August 2023The card game gets its own animation firstPokémon: Path to the Peak, a four-part original series about a TCG player, debuts at the 2023 Pokémon World Championships.
  5. August 31, 2026Pokémon: Wild Card is announcedRevealed at the 2026 World Championships closing ceremony. New protagonist Mikiya, partner Mimikyu, animation by CloverWorks. Worldwide release from 2027.

That expectation is not a construction by us. It shows up plainly in the reactions Japanese outlets quoted on the day.

ポケモン映画だけサトシ復活でもええんじゃないですかね…特別編ってことでダメですかね…寂しいんだよ未だにサトシロスなんだよ…

Couldn't we at least have Satoshi back for the movies? As a special, maybe? I miss him. I still haven't gotten over losing Satoshi.

Reaction quoted by ORICON NEWS · 2026-08-31

ポケモン映画、ポケカで帰ってくるとか言われても…求めてるのサトシだろうし

Telling me the Pokémon movies are coming back via the card game… what people want is Satoshi.

Reaction quoted by ORICON NEWS · 2026-08-31

参ったなぁ　サトシやリコロイの話かなと思ったら斜め上の方向にかっ飛んで行ったよ

Well, that got me. I assumed it would be a Satoshi story or a Liko and Roy story, and it shot off at a completely unexpected angle.

あにまんch comment thread · 2026-08-31

Two cautions belong here. First, no official source says Ash has been retired from Pokémon film. We found no announcement of a return, and we found no announcement ruling one out — the absence of news is not a policy. Second, the disappointment was not the only Japanese reaction, and treating it as such would misrepresent the sample. More on that below.

It Is Not a Horizons Movie Either

The part of this that gets lost when the story is framed as "no Ash" is that Wild Card is not a Horizons film either.

Liko and Roy have led the television anime since 2023. Pokémon Horizons: The Series is still running — its third season, Rising Hope, reached Netflix on January 6, 2026 — and no theatrical film for them has been announced. Pokémon has now gone seven years without a movie for a television cast, changed television casts once in that window, and returned to cinemas with neither cast.

The production lineage tells the same story. Coco, the 23rd film, was animated by OLM, the studio behind the television anime. Wild Card is animated by CloverWorks, with planning by STORY inc., a director whose credit fans immediately recognised from THE FIRST SLAM DUNK, and a character designer known for BANANA FISH. Japanese commenters noticed the break within minutes — one simply wrote that it wasn't an OLM production.

The Pokémon movie series, 1998–2020

23

  • 23 films, Satoshi in every one
  • Animation by OLM, the TV anime's studio
  • Tied to the television series' cast and region of the moment
  • Japanese theatrical release first, exported afterwards
  • Presented as the next entry in a numbered film series

Pokémon: Wild Card, 2027

1

  • New protagonist Mikiya; no announced Ash, Liko or Roy
  • Animation by CloverWorks; planning by STORY inc.
  • Built on the Pokémon Trading Card Game, which turns 30 in October 2026
  • Announced as a worldwide rollout beginning in 2027
  • Announced at the World Championships; official site links to the Card Game Trainers Website

The clearest signal is on the official site itself. The Pokémon: Wild Card homepage carries exactly three outbound links: its own X account, the main Pokémon portal, and the Pokémon Card Game Trainers Website. It does not link to the television anime.

A film positioning itself as the anime's next movie would point at the anime. This one points at the card game.

Why a Pokémon Card Game Movie Makes Sense

Framed as "Pokémon made a movie about a card game", the decision sounds like a gimmick. Framed against what the Pokémon Trading Card Game has become, it is close to the obvious pick.

The card game launched on October 20, 1996. By March 31, 2026, cumulative production had passed 85 billion cards, up from 75 billion a year earlier — roughly ten billion cards in a single year — sold in 16 languages across 90 countries and regions. Its 30th-anniversary product line was already dated before the film was announced, with the 30th CELEBRATION expansion set for a worldwide release in September 2026.

The press release does not treat that anniversary as background. It names it as the basis of the project.

The card game has also already carried its own animation. Pokémon: Path to the Peak, a four-part original series about a player named Ava working up from a school club to Worlds, debuted at the 2023 Pokémon World Championships and lives on the TCG's own pages, not the anime's. Wild Card was revealed at the 2026 World Championships. Both TCG-centred animations were launched at the tournament, to the competitive audience, rather than through an anime slot.

Set side by side, that is a franchise pillar with its own audience, its own 30-year history, its own commercial scale, its own website and now its own animation lineage. A film built on it does not need the television anime to justify it.

One Japanese commenter put the commercial logic more bluntly than we would: once the cards sell like that, it would be strange if nobody suggested making one.

This is where inference starts. None of the above is The Pokémon Company saying why it chose this project. It is the set of conditions that make the choice coherent.

What Japanese and English-Speaking Fans Are Actually Saying

A scope note first, because it changes how much weight these reactions can carry.

Our Japanese sample is the reactions ORICON NEWS quoted, the X posts BuzzFeed Japan quoted, and one あにまんch comment thread running from the announcement into September 1. Our English sample is one Nintendo Life comment thread from the same window, plus how English outlets framed their coverage. These are small, specific samples — enough to show what particular groups of people said on the day, not enough to measure either fandom.

What both samples share is easier to see than what divides them.

The Yu-Gi-Oh comparison arrived immediately in both languages. On あにまんch, someone asked whether Pokémon was going after the Yu-Gi-Oh and Duel Masters slot. On Nintendo Life, one commenter wrote that it made them think of Yu-Gi-Oh but Pokémon, and another noted a friend had made the same comparison unprompted. Neither is unfriendly — several people in both threads said the format could work.

Worry about promo cards and resellers also crossed languages, and in the English thread it dominated. Nintendo Life's most-upvoted comment in the thread was, in full, that this will also get scalped; the second was a joke that the villain will be a scalper. On the Japanese side, an X post quoted by BuzzFeed asked the company to please have countermeasures against resellers if there is a bonus card, and あにまんch commenters worked through the theatre-level consequences — people collecting the card and skipping the film, half-empty screenings, cards going missing.

Where the samples diverge is Ash — and the divergence is not the one you might expect.

In the Japanese material, Satoshi is the centre of gravity. Oricon built an entire follow-up article around the disappointment. In the 33-comment Nintendo Life thread, Ash is mentioned exactly once, and not as a demand: a commenter observed approvingly that the anime went with an all-new cast so it could tell stories without having to fit Ash into them.

But English-language coverage did centre Ash. Screen Rant headlined its report on the Ash and Pikachu replacements and spent much of the piece measuring Mikiya against him — noting he looks considerably older, and that the hood and the sullen expression suggest a far more withdrawn lead.

So the honest version is narrower than a Japan-versus-the-West split: in the samples we reviewed, Japanese fan comment engaged with Ash's absence directly and English fan comment mostly did not, while English media framing did. One comment thread is thin evidence for a national mood, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

It is also worth recording that the Japanese sample was not uniformly unhappy.

サトシだと絶対リコ煽るやつ出てくるし逆もありそうだし全くの新作で正解だと思う

If it were Satoshi, people would use it to needle Liko fans, and the reverse would happen too. A completely new work is the right call.

あにまんch comment thread · 2026-08-31

映画にするのはアニポケである必要はもうないんだ

A Pokémon movie doesn't have to be the Pokémon anime any more.

あにまんch comment thread · 2026-08-31

“ポケカ”を題材にした”映画”！？お…お前遊戯王やデュエマ枠でも狙ってるのか…

A movie about the card game?! Are you going after the Yu-Gi-Oh and Duel Masters slot…

あにまんch comment thread · 2026-08-31

The second of those — that a Pokémon movie no longer has to be the Pokémon anime — is, in one line, the argument this article is making.

Wild Card May Be Testing a New Kind of Pokémon Movie

Here is the reading we think the evidence best supports.

Pokémon: Wild Card looks less like a conventional restart of the Pokémon movie series and more like a new film format being tested under the Pokémon name — with the card game as the thing it is being tested on.

Five things point that way, and none of them are about Ash:

  1. The production lineage is new. Twenty-three films came out of OLM alongside the television anime. This one comes from CloverWorks and STORY inc., with a director and character designer drawn from outside the Pokémon film pipeline entirely.
  2. The official site is TCG-facing. Its outbound links go to the card game's hub, not the anime's.
  3. The subject is stated as the card game's 30th anniversary, in the company's own press release, rather than as a story from the anime's world.
  4. The announcement venue was the World Championships, as it was for Path to the Peak — addressed to players, in a room of players, by a CEO who described the protagonist as one of them.
  5. The protagonist is designed away from the template. An older, hooded, guarded lead is not a small adjustment to the Ash silhouette; it is a different kind of character in a different kind of film.

Add the release pattern — announced from the start as a worldwide rollout, rather than a Japanese summer release exported afterwards — and the shape of the thing is a standalone animated film that happens to be set in the Pokémon franchise, rather than an instalment of a series.

The Pokémon Company's own press release closes its description by inviting attention to the opening of a new chapter. That is marketing language and we are not going to over-read a single phrase. But it is at least consistent with everything else here.

If that reading is right, the interesting question stops being "why isn't Ash in this one" and becomes "how many kinds of Pokémon film is Pokémon planning to make". A franchise that runs a television anime, a separate TCG animation line and a Disney+ stop-motion series simultaneously is not a franchise with one canonical output any more.

What Would Prove This Theory Wrong?

We would rather name the falsifiers than defend the theory later.

  • Ash appears in Wild Card. A cameo, a framing device, a late-trailer reveal. Any of those would make this a bridge back to the series rather than a departure from it, and would suggest the silence was a marketing hold rather than a design decision.
  • A Horizons film is announced. If Liko and Roy get a 2027 or 2028 theatrical release, then Wild Card is not a replacement for anything — the movie line simply widened, and our framing of it as a format test is too strong.
  • Wild Card turns out to be a one-off anniversary tie-in. If nothing follows it and the next Pokémon film returns to the television cast and OLM, the correct description was "30th-anniversary special", not "new format".
  • The card game turns out to be set dressing. If the finished film uses the TCG as a hook and resolves into a conventional Pokémon adventure, the "TCG as a pillar in its own right" argument weakens considerably.
  • A conventional explanation covers it. Production capacity, scheduling, or a director's personal project could account for the whole shape of this without any strategy behind it. We cannot rule that out from public information.

Any one of those would land. We will update this piece if they do.

The Bottom Line

The framing that travelled fastest — Pokémon brought back its movies and forgot Ash — is the least interesting thing that happened here.

What the official materials actually describe is a film that starts from the card game's 30th anniversary, is made by a studio and staff with no history in the Pokémon film series, was announced to competitive players at a tournament, and points its audience at the Pokémon Card Game Trainers Website rather than at the anime.

On that evidence, this reads less like Pokémon simply reviving its movies and more like Pokémon using one to find out whether another part of the franchise can carry a film of its own — and the answer to that will matter far longer than whether Ash was in it.

Sources

Tags#Pokémon#Pokémon TCG#Pokémon: Wild Card#Anime Movies#Pokémon Horizons

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