A mildly warm take that I've somehow never seen before.
The SuMo art style is very good, but Ash has a bad design.
Everyone else looks fine, it's just that he wasn't adapted to the art style well. He's always been a very angular and spiky character, so making him soft and squishy was never going to go over well with the fans, but Ash specifically looks terrible in a way that none of the other characters do, and I think it soured everyone's opinion of the show before they could actually watch it.
Character design rant below the cut.
Regarding his design being bad, I'm actually surprised that nobody's cared to explain why he doesn't look right beyond "he's SQUISHY >:C" because if you look at his SuMo design alongside the others, it's actually pretty easy to see what's wrong with him.
They messed up his anatomy.
Let me explain.
Throughout the course of the previous anime series, Ash has had a relatively consistent facial structure, even during the switch to digital animation. SuMo, however, drew his face wrong and for some reason, they just kept it like that.
The image I found in this Reddit post has them all side by side (minus Journeys) and with them all together, it's pretty blatantly obvious what they got wrong with his anatomy.
His eyes are too small and his mouth is too big. That's it.
Stylized as SuMo was, I'm genuinely shocked that they didn't go back and fix something as simple as this, given how much effort they put into the rest of the animation.
Another weird thing about this design is that nobody else in the anime has proportions like this. It's literally just Ash. I'd be more understanding of the "It's just a different art style!" crowd if that weren't the case, but Ash's design is uniquely bad in a way that none of the other characters are.
Fuck, Mallow's face structure is more Ash-like than the Ash we got in SuMo. If it's really just stylization, why didn't they make him look more like her instead of what we got?
Along with the fucked up anatomy, I don't like his outfit and I don't think that it's something that Ash would realistically wear day-to-day, given what we've seen him with before. The color scheme is right, but throughout the series, he's shown a preference for wearing sportswear, particularly lightweight jackets and fingerless gloves that look similar to the special batting gloves that baseball players use. Comparatively, the outfit he wears in SuMo looks like something he pulled out of the Old Navy bargain bin. It might be a decent enough outfit for another character, but it doesn't look right for Ash.
Obviously he wasn't actively traveling like how he was in the prior generations, but because he never stopped working with Pokémon while he was in Alola, I don't see a reason for him to drop the sportswear. Even when they dressed him up as fucking Calem in XY, they did the bare minimum and modified his outfit so that it was more appropriate for his character, cutting off the sleeves and letting him keep his gloves. If they were that hellbent on making him cosplay Elio from the games, why didn't they do the same thing they did in XY?
I also generally hated the relatively short lived XY-SuMo trend of putting him in other characters' outfits and I'm glad it died. Rest in piss.
In short, despite what rage baiting YouTube channels would have you believe, SuMo doesn't have the worst art style ever made.
(That honor goes to Journeys, but that's a rant for another day.)
Hell, it doesn't even have a bad art style, and the show is both a fun break from the bland edgefest that was XY and just a generally well animated series. Ash's design just sucks because for whatever reason, the character designers went out of their way to make it suck, and I'm sad that the animators got so much shit for it when it was just one shitty design in a sea of good ones.
So to all the people who have been fighting for a million years over whether SuMo is ugly or not, here's your answer.
There is one (1) ugly character design in the show that breaks all of the design conventions of that show for no reason and everything else is great. All of you can shut up now. Goodbye.
I just find it funny that even Clefable was just completely surprised that she doesn’t even know when the other Meltan showed up. And isn’t she worried, because more Meltan means less space in the future and more food for her to give to them.
-team skull theme starts playing in the distance- Yo, OK, hear me out here.. Plumeria is cute. Like, she's really, REALLY cute, OK? I'm not really active in the Pokémon fandom but I wanted to draw these two and I started to look for reference pictures and OH. BOY. Plumeria made her debut in the anime? Sign me the heck up -slams fist on table- she looks so good and I loooove her voice what the heck she's perfect.
