Pokémon 4Ever: Celebi - Voice of the Forest — the first movie in the saga with no French theatrical release

This is the film that marks the break: after three theatrical releases in fourteen months, the Pokémon saga disappears from French theaters for sixteen years. Released in Japan on July 7, 2001, Pokémon 4Ever: Celebi - Voice of the Forest took nearly six years to reach French audiences, and even then only on DVD. Yet it has one of the most surprising plots of the classic era: a time-travel story that quietly links Ash's present to a past forty years gone. Here is our complete deep dive into this fourth feature film.

Contents

• The turning-point film
• The plot, without spoiling the ending
• Celebi and Suicune, a Mythical and a Legendary from Johto
• Who travels with Ash, and who's missing
• The final reveal, for those who've already seen the film
• What this film changed in the series
• Production, dubbing and music
• An undeniable box-office failure
• The French release: 2007, on DVD, six years later
• What remains of it today
• Pokémon 4Ever: Celebi - Voice of the Forest at a glance
• Frequently Asked Questions

The turning-point film

Pokémon 4Ever: Celebi - Voice of the Forest opens in Japan on July 7, 2001, in the July slot the franchise has never left. On paper, nothing has changed: Kunihiko Yuyama directs, OLM animates, Toho distributes and Shinji Miyazaki writes the score. In practice, this is the film where the saga's international machine seizes up for good.

The clearest signal comes from the United States. The first three feature films had been handled there by Warner Bros.; this fourth film changes hands and goes to Miramax, which gives it a limited release in fall 2002 rather than a nationwide launch. The difference in ambition is immediately visible in the numbers, and it has knock-on effects in every other territory, France included.

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The screenplay changes hands too. Takeshi Shudō, who had written the three previous films, passes the pen to Hideki Sonoda, his co-writer on the third. It's the end of a writing cycle: the man who had brought the darkness of the first film and the grief of the third is no longer at the helm.

The film runs 75 minutes. In Japan, it was preceded on the bill by a short film, Pikachu's PikaBoo — a companion piece that French audiences never saw in theaters, since there was never a French theatrical run. Its exact place in the saga as a whole is laid out in our overview of the 23 feature films.

The plot, without spoiling the ending

On their way to the Johto League, Ash and his friends cross a large forest and find two unconscious bodies there: a boy of about ten named Sammy, and a Celebi that is badly injured. Neither of them belongs to this time. Forty years earlier, chased by a Pokémon hunter, they had been hurled into the future by Celebi's power.

The group decides to take the creature to the forest's Pokémon Center. That's where the film introduces its antagonist: the Iron-Masked Marauder, an officer of Team Rocket armed with a Dark Ball, a Poké Ball that can corrupt a captured Pokémon and turn it against its own kind. His goal isn't to sell Celebi but to use it.

🔴 The Iron-Masked Marauder turned a Poké Ball into a weapon: his Dark Ball exists only to turn Celebi against its own kind. At home, catching a Pokémon is still just a game, and that's all you'll find in our Pokémon toys section.

A long chase follows, during which Ash and Sammy bond despite the forty years that separate them. The Iron-Masked Marauder eventually gets his hands on Celebi, with help from Jessie, James and Meowth — a rare alliance, since the comic trio squarely takes the villain's side here. Once corrupted, the creature becomes a weapon of considerable power.

That's the moment Suicune chooses to make its entrance. The final part of the film pits the Legendary of the waters against the Iron-Masked Marauder's machine, while Ash and Sammy try to remind Celebi of who it used to be. The climax involves the lake around which the whole forest is built, and it holds a reveal about Sammy's identity that we'll save for later in this deep dive.

Celebi and Suicune, a Mythical and a Legendary from Johto

Celebi is a Mythical Pokémon, the category that includes the hardest-to-obtain species in the franchise, covered in detail in our guide to Legendary and Mythical Pokémon. In the second generation, it holds exactly the place Mew held in the first: the last entry in the regional Pokédex, virtually unobtainable in-game, and wrapped in an aura of rarity kept alive by the media.

Its power, time travel, is the real engine of the film. The script uses it not to pile up paradoxes but to build a friendship between two children forty years apart, a surprisingly restrained use of such a spectacular ability. The film carefully steers clear of time loops and technical explanations.

Suicune, for its part, belongs to Johto's trio of Legendary beasts, along with Entei and Raikou. This is its first appearance in a feature film of the saga: contrary to what you sometimes read, it wasn't in the third film, where only Entei appeared, and even then as an illusion. How these groups work is explained in our feature on Legendary trios and duos.

The film stays faithful to Suicune's mythological role as the purifier of waters. Its intervention isn't about winning a battle but about restoring the lake's purity, which ties it directly to the founding stories we explore in our feature on regional legends and mythologies.

Who travels with Ash, and who's missing

In this fourth film, Ash travels with Misty and Brock, the classic lineup. The point is worth making, because the second film had replaced Brock with Tracey for the Orange Islands arc: here, it's back to the usual team. The hero's overall journey is traced in our feature on Ash and the Pokémon anime.

Tracey, as it happens, is the subject of an adaptation oddity. He appears briefly in the Japanese version, during a phone conversation with Professor Oak, but the scene was cut from the international release. You can still spot him in the end credits of the Western version, where he finds a sketchbook — a link that makes little sense once the original scene has been removed.

Ash's team pins the film down precisely within the series: his Chikorita has evolved into Bayleef, which places the action in a narrow window of the Johto era. The film also contains a small first for the saga: it's the first feature film in which a Pokémon evolves on screen, in this case a Metapod that becomes a Butterfree.

On the villain front, the Iron-Masked Marauder is a welcome change after the tormented Mewtwo of the first film, the collector of the second and the complete absence of a villain in the third. He's a cold professional with no personal motive, who treats Pokémon like equipment. His Dark Ball would have an unexpected legacy: the idea of a corrupted, stolen Pokémon was picked up three years later for an entire game, as detailed in our feature on Pokémon Colosseum and XD.

Finally, this film contains two firsts involving the comic trio. It's the first feature film in which Jessie, James and Meowth directly lend the main villain a hand, and the first in which they blast off into the sky the way they do in the TV series.

The final reveal, for those who've already seen the film

This section reveals the ending: if you haven't seen the film yet, skip straight to the next one. The boy from the past, Sammy, is none other than a young Professor Oak. The film plants clues without ever underlining them, then brings them together in a final scene where the professor, answering a phone call, knows the boy's name before anyone tells him.

📱 A single phone call is all it takes to give Professor Oak away: he already knows the boy's name when he's introduced to him. Your own phone has nothing so weighty to hide, but it can at least wear a Pokémon Samsung case.

The detail that seals the reveal is a Charmeleon. During the battle, Sammy calls on the evolution of a Charmander, which incidentally establishes that the future Professor Oak owned a Pokémon from Kanto's Fire starter line. The full gallery of the franchise's researchers is gathered in our guide to the Pokémon Professors.

This idea has a deep consequence for the series. It retroactively establishes Professor Oak as a former field Trainer, rather than the desk-bound scientist the games suggested. The character gains a youth, an adventure and a personal reason to be interested in rare Pokémon.

The Western version actually found the reveal too subtle for its audience. Scenes were modified and added for the international release to make Sammy's identity more explicit, whereas the Japanese version merely hinted at it. It's a rare case where the Western adaptation clarifies the story instead of watering it down.

What this film changed in the series

The fourth film quietly resolved a plot thread left hanging in the TV series. The famous GS Ball, the golden Poké Ball Ash was supposed to deliver and whose contents were never revealed, was originally meant to hold a Celebi. Since the film had taken over the subject, the idea was dropped and the GS Ball was left forgotten with a Poké Ball maker, with no explanation. It's one of the most famous storylines the franchise has ever left hanging.

The film was also preceded by a rumor that became famous. A supposed interview with the Japanese actress who voices Ash, in which she allegedly announced she was leaving the role after the fourth film, spread from a forum and eventually made its way into the American press. TV Tokyo denied that any such interview ever took place. The irony: the film in question did exist, and the third feature film ended in Japan with a short teaser showing Celebi.

At its core, this fourth film continues the logic started by the second: turning the yearly feature film into a showcase for a rare Pokémon from the current game. Celebi belongs to the second generation, whose contents are covered in our features on Gold and Silver and Crystal .

Lastly, it heralds the end of a production era. It's the second-to-last film of the Johto era: only Pokémon Heroes, released in Japan on July 13, 2002, still comes before the series moves on to Hoenn and a new generation of characters, with all the turnover that implies both on screen and behind the camera.

Production, dubbing and music

The credits stay the same: Kunihiko Yuyama directing, Hideki Sonoda writing, Shinji Miyazaki on the original score, OLM on animation and Toho handling Japanese distribution, for 75 minutes. Visually, the film is more restrained than the second, with a single setting — the forest and its lake — used from start to finish.

It's in its sound that this film clearly stands apart from its predecessors. Unlike the first three feature films, whose scores had been largely rewritten for Western audiences, the Japanese soundtrack is mostly kept here. Only the opening and ending songs and the title-screen theme were replaced. So for the first time, French-speaking viewers hear roughly the same music Japanese audiences heard.

The international release did, however, add an introduction missing from the Japanese version — and that introduction doesn't come from the film itself: it's taken from the next feature film, which had already come out in Japan by the time of the dub, and set to American music borrowed from the first film. A comedic scene featuring Team Rocket is also exclusive to the Western version.

One point is of particular interest to French-speaking audiences: this film wasn't dubbed in Belgium, as was the norm for the series at the time, but in France. Two small errors remain in this version: a move translated literally from English, and a Togepi that pronounces its own name "Tojepi" in some scenes.

An undeniable box-office failure

This film's numbers don't compare to any of those that came before it. In the United States, it opens in limited release on October 11, 2002, and earns $717,061 over its opening weekend in 249 theaters, placing 18th at the North American weekend box office. The official premiere takes place on October 25. Compare that with the $8.2 million the third film had earned on its opening weekend alone, eighteen months earlier, in 2,675 theaters.

In Japan, the film takes in 3.9 billion yen in gross box-office receipts, and its worldwide total stands at $28.0 million according to Box Office Mojo — $1,727,447 in North America and $26,296,116 elsewhere. The $40.8 million total published in infoboxes adds together that North American figure, $79,642 in Dutch receipts and the Japanese gross converted at a rate of one hundred yen to the dollar, which gives $39 million for what is actually 3.9 billion yen. The decline is dizzying when you line up the first four feature films on a like-for-like basis, according to Box Office Mojo: $163.6 million, then 133.9, then 68.4, then 28.0. In four years, the saga lost more than four-fifths of its international audience.

The explanation lies largely in the change of distributor. A limited release from Miramax has neither the reach nor the marketing budget of a Warner Bros. launch, and the film never got the chance to reach a wide theatrical audience outside Japan. Pulling back had become a rational business decision after three results in steady decline.

You shouldn't conclude from this that the film is bad. Its script is one of the best-constructed of the era, and the final reveal remains one of the great continuity moments in the entire franchise. It wasn't the quality that collapsed between 1998 and 2001, it was the intensity of the commercial phenomenon carrying the saga.

The French release: 2007, on DVD, six years later

This is where the film's French peculiarity comes into play, and it's a spectacular one. Pokémon 4Ever: Celebi - Voice of the Forest was never released in French theaters. The three previous feature films had been shown there — the first on April 5, 2000, the second on December 20, 2000, and the third on June 13, 2001 — and they are the only three in the entire saga to have had a genuine theatrical run in France: French cinemas have shown the franchise only twice since, with I Choose You! from November 5 to 17, 2017, then Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel as special-event screenings on November 22 and 23, 2025. From this fourth film onward, France switched for good to home video, then to TV and streaming.

The French release date is May 16, 2007, nearly six years after the Japanese release. And the film didn't even arrive alone: May 16, 2007, saw three Pokémon feature films released at once, the fourth, sixth and seventh, in a massive catch-up release.

The release format is also worth spelling out, as it explains the frequent confusion about this date. The film wasn't released as a standalone DVD but in a three-disc box set titled Les Aventures des Pokémon. It wasn't until April 2, 2009 that it was released on its own, followed by May 2010 for an edition bundled with trading cards, and 2017 for a reissue.

📀 This fourth film never got a single cinema seat in France: it arrived on May 16, 2007, tucked into the Les Aventures des Pokémon box set. So at home, you end up watching it on the floor in front of the TV, and you might as well do it on a Pokémon rug.

The consequence for the French chronology is frankly absurd, and it's worth spelling out in black and white: the fifth film in the saga came out in France on July 13, 2005, nearly two years before the fourth. So French viewers discovered the sequel before the installment it followed. This mix-up is mapped out in our guide to all the movies.

What remains of it today

The film's main legacy is a supporting character who became central. By giving Professor Oak an adventurous childhood, it turned an exposition figure into a character with a past, and the series never quite saw the Pallet Town scientist the same way again.

It also permanently tied Celebi to the themes of time and the forest, well beyond anything the games said about it. Where the cartridge settled for a rare Pokémon with an exotic move, the film gave it a narrative role and a place. It's the same service the third film had done for the Unown.

Lastly, for French audiences, this film holds a melancholy place. It's the first film in the saga that France missed, and it kicked off a long run of late, disorderly and low-profile releases that lasted almost twenty years. Many French-speaking viewers who had seen the first three films in theaters don't even know this one exists.

Yet it's one of the easiest to recommend to a newcomer. The film is short and self-contained, requires no prior knowledge of the series, and its final scene rewards those who know the universe without shutting out everyone else. If you want to understand the Johto era, it's the best entry point available, along with the third film.

Pokémon 4Ever: Celebi - Voice of the Forest at a glance

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is the exact French title of the fourth Pokémon movie?
  Its official French title is Pokémon 4Ever - Celebi, la voix de la forêt (in English, Pokémon 4Ever: Celebi - Voice of the Forest). The Japanese title translates as Celebi: A Timeless Encounter, and the American title is most often shortened to Pokémon 4Ever. The words Celebi, la voix de la forêt are indeed part of the full French title.
• Was the fourth Pokémon movie released in theaters in France?
  No. It never had a theatrical run in France. Only three feature films in the saga had a genuine theatrical release there: the first on April 5, 2000, the second on December 20, 2000, and the third on June 13, 2001. From this fourth film onward, France switched to direct-to-video releases. French cinemas have shown the saga only twice since: I Choose You! from November 5 to 17, 2017, then Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel as special-event screenings on November 22 and 23, 2025.
• When was this film released in France, and in what format?
  It came out on May 16, 2007, nearly six years after its Japanese release on July 7, 2001, and only on DVD. It wasn't sold on its own but in a three-disc box set titled Les Aventures des Pokémon. A standalone DVD edition only arrived on April 2, 2009.
• Why was the fifth movie released in France before the fourth?
  Because from the fourth film onward, French releases followed the pace of home video editions rather than the Japanese order. The fifth film came out in France on July 13, 2005, while the fourth had to wait until May 16, 2007. On that day, three films were actually released at once: the fourth, the sixth and the seventh.
• Did Suicune already appear in the third Pokémon movie?
  No. The fourth film is Suicune's first appearance in a feature film of the saga. The third film featured Entei, another member of Johto's trio of Legendary beasts, and even then it was an illusion created by the Unown, not the real Legendary Pokémon.
• What is the Dark Ball used by the Iron-Masked Marauder?
  It's a modified Poké Ball that corrupts the Pokémon it captures and turns it into an aggressive creature serving its owner. The concept was picked up three years later in the game Pokémon Colosseum, in the form of Shadow Pokémon that you steal from other Trainers instead of catching them in the wild.
• What's the connection between this film and the GS Ball from the anime?
  The GS Ball, the golden Poké Ball Ash was supposed to deliver in the series and whose contents were never revealed, was originally meant to contain a Celebi. Since the fourth film had covered this Pokémon, the idea was dropped and the GS Ball storyline was left permanently unresolved.

In short