Dear Reader:
Mr. Mime was almost cut from Detective Pikachu
Detective Pikachu looks fantastic so far, but the stand-out scenes in various trailers involves Mr. Mime. The Pokemon has always been a weird one, and that weirdness is dialed up to 11 for Detective Pikachu. It results in some truly funny and outrageous-looking scenes, which is why it's so surprising to learn that Mr. Mime almost didn't make it into the film.
In an interview with IGN, director Rob Letterman discusses just how hard it was to make Mr. Mime work, why the character was almost cut, and how the whole idea ended up coming together.
“I thought it would be really funny if we played that classic film noir detective interrogation scene, but with Mr. Mime. In their search for Tim's missing father, [they learn his father] had an informant at the docks. So they go down to the docks, which is kind of creepy part of town, and they bump into this Mr. Mime character and it recognizes Pikachu, then they realize wait a minute, Pikachu is his father's old partner. He recognizes him. They put two and two together and realize the father's informant was actually a Pokemon. So they run down the Mime and do like a classic police interrogation scene ripped out of every detective movie I could think of, but flipped on its head. Because the uncooperative informant that they're interviewing happens to be a mime.
It was the most awkward, weird thing to shoot. Just reenacting it for you now is making my head explode. It was bizarre. Full disclosure, I thought no way in a million years would [the Mr. Mime scene] work. Honestly. It was so weird. I wanted to cut it at one point, because I was like this can't possibly work. It's insane Then we just started showing it to people and people were losing their minds. They were just cracking up and it was so out there. It became one of the standout scenes. We did previews of the movie, people were cheering to see that section. Which is really weird.”
The most uncomfortable question was me asking permission to put [Mr. Mime] into the movie, because I went to The Pokemon Company. I was like I have this idea for this scene, and it requires realizing Mr. Mime photoreal into the live-action world. They thought about it, and [based on all the reasons listed above], they literally looked at me, like yeah you don't wanna do that. That's not gonna work. That's gonna be too weird. That's gonna be creepy. For all those reasons, it can't work. It came to the point where I literally had to ask the President of the whole Pokemon Company, Ishihara-san. I gave him the whole pitch, and he started laughing, and he's like okay, give it a shot.
[Mr. Mime] basically broke all the rules of what's going on in our movie. To give you some insight, Pikachu for example, or the Bulbasaurs or Charizards, there's so much real-world design going into those very simple characters. Pikachu we tried to stay true to the silhouette of a Pikachu. While at the same time putting in realistic fur. There's realistic muscle systems and there's skeletal systems, there's eyeball systems. The fur simulates and interacts, and when it gets wet it gets wet. There's all this technology that goes into bringing those Pokemon characters to life. Because we're basing them on real-world physics. Then comes in Mr. Mime, which is bonkers because you can't do any of that stuff with it. So we thought okay, how do we get some sort of sense of photo real texturing in without breaking the Mr. Mime kind of cartoon nature of him?
That led to a lot of discussions of he's a clown, he's a mime clown, what would clowns wear? They would be dressed up in these clown suits. Well those spheres for shoulders, what if they were rubber balls, like the kind you play kickball with? The hands are made of those balloons that kind of have that metallic balloon plastic. Everything started to build. The face became this weird thing. It was such a fine line from disturbing to funny. So we were dancing back and forth with adding a little bit of hair to break it up so it didn't have a plastic feel, but not too much skin texture so it didn't feel like a human being with a deformed face. It went on forever until we finally landed on what you could describe as funny and disturbing.”