Pokemon is making a movie about the card game, and OLM is not animating it
Pokémon: Wild Card was announced on Monday at the World Championships in San Francisco — the franchise's first new animated feature since 2020, arriving in 2027. Two things about it break with 29 years of precedent: it is animated by CloverWorks, not OLM, and it is about the card game.
Tsunekazu Ishihara, president of The Pokémon Company, revealed it at the closing ceremony of PokémonXP alongside a 39-second teaser in Japanese and English. He said the film "aims to capture the competitive spirit shared by Pokémon Trainers around the world."
What was actually confirmed
- Director: Katsuhiko Kitada. Character design: Akemi Hayashi (Banana Fish, the 2001 Fruits Basket, Lazarus).
- Animation: CloverWorks. Planning and production: STORY inc.
- Premise: a Pokémon TCG player and his partner Mimikyu. "When the time comes to put their cards on the table, will they have what it takes to achieve their goals?"
- Mimikyu is the only Pokémon confirmed. No region, no other creatures.
- No Ash Ketchum, and none of the Horizons cast.
- The logo bends the second "o" in Pokémon into a squiggle echoing Mimikyu's drawn-on smile.
Read the release wording carefully: the English teaser closes on "Coming 2027 and beyond," and The Pokémon Company is describing the release as beginning in 2027 rather than giving one worldwide date. A Japanese-first release with international dates later is the obvious reading, but it has not been said.
Why CloverWorks is the headline
OLM has animated every Pokémon production since 1997 — the TV series and all 23 features from 1998 to 2020, including Secrets of the Jungle, and the current Horizons. Wild Card ends that.
CloverWorks is an Aniplex studio, spun out of A-1 Pictures in 2018, roughly 258 staff. Its catalogue is Horimiya, My Dress-Up Darling, Bocchi the Rock!, The Promised Neverland, Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai, Wonder Egg Priority, and Spy × Family as a co-production with Wit. That is a house style built on character drama for an older audience than the Pokémon TV anime aims at — which lines up with a story about a competitive card player rather than a ten-year-old and a Legendary.
One caution on the director: Kitada's record is animation direction and episode direction — chief animation director on Hal and The Rolling Girls, unit director on The First Slam Dunk, storyboards on Wind Breaker. No prior feature-directing credit is listed for him.
The number that frames this
Pokémon: The First Movie held the record for highest-grossing anime film in North America ($85.7M) for 26 years, until Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle took it in 2025. Infinity Castle did around $685–740M worldwide depending on which source you take — the first Japanese film past ¥100bn globally — and Japanese box office as a whole rose 32.6% in 2025 to about $1.78bn.
Meanwhile the Pokémon films themselves have shrunk: The First Movie $163.6M worldwide, Secrets of the Jungle in 2020 roughly $21–24M. Pokémon walks back into a theatrical market it once defined and no longer leads.
Two announcements in four days, both in the 30th-anniversary year: a global Disney+ deal on 28 August with an Aardman stop-motion series, and a new feature on 31 August from a studio that has never touched the franchise. Pokémon is changing its animation partners and its distribution at the same time.
Still unannounced
Screenwriter, voice cast, composer, exact date, region, runtime, rating, distributor, territory plans, English dub, and the protagonist's name. Reports naming the lead should be treated with suspicion — the one name circulating appears in a single outlet and looks like a garbling of "Mimikyu." No quotes from CloverWorks, STORY inc., Kitada or Hayashi have been published.
Meanwhile Horizons continues on TV Tokyo in its eighth arc, Wonder Voyage, still animated by OLM. Related: One-Punch Man is going free with its dub for the first time.