BODY: There's a particular ache to the last days of a Japanese summer — cicadas thinning out, the smell of a fading festival — and Pokémon has just distilled it into a hand-crafted short film.
On August 12, The Pokémon Company released "Wartortle and the Rest of Summer" (カメールと、夏のつづき), the newest entry in its POKÉTOON anthology, free to watch on the official Pokémon YouTube channel. The short follows a boy and a Wartortle — the middle evolution of Squirtle — through the memories of a single fleeting summer, leaning into the bittersweet, coming-of-age tone that POKÉTOON has increasingly embraced.
The project's biggest talking point is its director: Seigo Yamashita, one of the most watched young animators working in Japanese anime today. Yamashita built his reputation on kinetic, emotionally charged action sequences for series like Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man, making him an unexpected but intriguing choice to steer a quiet, character-driven Pokémon short.
Launched in 2020, POKÉTOON has become The Pokémon Company's playground for handing individual Pokémon over to distinctive directors and studios, each free to reinterpret the franchise in their own visual style — from slapstick comedy to painterly drama. Releasing this new short in mid-August, right at the heart of Japan's summer-vacation season, is a deliberate seasonal touch that mirrors the film's own subject matter.
The insider take
From Tokyo, the casting of Yamashita signals just how seriously Pokémon now treats POKÉTOON as a prestige showcase rather than a marketing afterthought. Tapping an animator beloved by the Jujutsu Kaisen generation is a savvy bid to reach older, animation-literate fans who follow directors by name — the same crowd that turns Sakuga clips into social-media events. For a franchise often pigeonholed as kids' content, courting this audience with a melancholy summer memory piece is a quietly ambitious move.
Originally reported by コミックナタリー - 最新ニュース (Japanese).