Many fans of Pokémon anime has been looking forward to seeing its characters actually get a chance to grow up, but as it turns out, at least one character has had the honor of appearing as an adult in official media – or so it seems. However, this appearance really only raises more questions than it answers, as the setting in which it comes from remains an absolute mystery.
In one of the first commercials for Pokémon the Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back, the trailer opens with a scene of two adults and a child looking at clouds in the sky that look like Pokémon. One of the adults happens to look a lot like an adult version of Misty, which has fueled a lot of speculation about the exact setting of the scene. No such scene appears in the final version of the movie, nor does it even have a moment that resembles it.
The truth of this scene has become more and more complicated over time, as the film's director came to his conclusion more than 20 years later.
Did Mewtwo Strikes Back originally feature adult versions of Misty and Ash?
The film's director says no, but there's reason to be skeptical.
In 2019, while promoting the remake of Mewtwo Strikes Back, known as Mewtwo Strikes Back EVOLUTION, the director of both films, Kunihiko Yuyama, was quoted by comicbook.com as saying, “Honestly, that’s a good question. Thank you very much. But actually that's not the adult version of Misty. It's an adult with a child. But I think a lot of people get that wrong. It's not really the adult version of Misty.”
Needless to say, many fans found this explanation hard to believe. The character not only resembles Misty in face and hair color, but more specifically has the hairstyle she's seen in Pokémon Gold and Silver, where she's older than she is in the anime, or Red and Blue. Another part of the fan theory says that the girl with her is Ash and Misty's daughter, but this quote seems to contradict that idea as well, suggesting it's just a generic adult and child pair. This scene was probably never intended to be in the film, and was more of an unrelated promotional scene since there wasn't much in the film to show yet. It wouldn't be surprising if Yuyama didn't remember it at all, since it was a relatively unimportant piece of animation from 20 years ago.
While the idea of seeing Ash and Misty's daughter in the first Pokémon movie might seem absurd, seeing an older Misty isn't as absurd as you might think. The original anime's head writer, Takeshi Shudo, has gone on record as saying that he planned an ending where an older Ash would look back on his life and adventures. While this idea was obviously never used, it's possible that this inspired the cloud-viewing scene. Since it was meant to be promotional anyway, it doesn't necessarily follow the original story. The truth of the matter is that this is still one of the Pokémonthe greatest mysteries of, and even a direct refutation does little to solve it.
