Pokémon: Arceus and the Jewel of Life: the movie that closes the Sinnoh trilogy

A debt centuries old, and a creditor who created the world. Released in Japan on July 18, 2009, Pokémon: Arceus and the Jewel of Life is the twelfth feature film in the series and the final chapter of the Sinnoh trilogy. It does what no Pokémon movie had done before: it brings together Sinnoh's three dragons, brings back characters from the two previous installments, and sends Ash himself into the past to right a betrayal he never committed.

Contents

• July 2009: A Finale Announced a Year in Advance
• What This Installment Brings to a Close
• The Plot: A Broken Promise
• Arceus, Said to Have Created Everything
• Dialga, Palkia and Giratina, Together at Last
• The First Time Ash Travels Back in Time
• Sheena, Damos, Marcus: The Faces of Michina
• Production and Music: Greece and an Eclipse
• The Movie That Unlocks HeartGold and SoulSilver
• The French Release, and What Remains of It
• Arceus and the Jewel of Life at a Glance
• Frequently Asked Questions

July 2009: A Finale Announced a Year in Advance

The film opened in Japanese theaters on July 18, 2009, eleven years to the day after the very first screening of the franchise's first-ever feature film. The coincidence is probably no accident for a movie about origins and old debts. Our complete guide to the Pokémon movies places this twelfth installment within the series as a whole.

Its Japanese title, アルセウス 超克の時空へ, roughly translates as "Arceus: Toward a Transcended Space-Time." The French title, Pokémon: Arceus and the Jewel of Life, chooses to name the object of the dispute rather than the metaphysical ambition — a far more telling choice for the target audience, and faithful to what the movie is actually about.

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A rarity in the series: the movie had been confirmed a year earlier, in July 2008, at the end of the credits of Giratina and the Sky Warrior, with a teaser showing Giratina, Dialga and Palkia ready to square off above a set of ruins. Announcing a sequel after the credits was, at the time, a Western blockbuster move, not something Japanese family anime did.

💎 Where the Japanese title aimed for a transcended space-time, the French title chose to name an object: the Jewel of Life. And a jewel is meant to be worn — in your hair, in the form of a Pokémon hair clip.

What This Installment Brings to a Close

The Sinnoh trilogy is the only continuous storyline among the twenty-three films in the Pokémon series, and this twelfth installment is its conclusion. Its job is to bring everyone together: where The Rise of Darkrai pitted Dialga against Palkia, and where Giratina and the Sky Warrior brought in the third member of the trio, this one finally puts all three in the same shot.

The continuity isn't just about the creatures. The movie brings back supporting characters from the two previous installments: Alice, Tonio and Baron Alberto, met in Alamos Town, as well as Zero and Newton Graceland, from the Reverse World. Their appearances are brief, but they finish binding the three movies into a single whole.

And as far as the dragons go, the logic is crystal clear. Dialga is the only one to appear in all three movies; Palkia returns from Alamos Town after sitting out the second installment; Giratina returns from the Reverse World. No other movie in the series can line up such a cast of returning faces.

What this installment brings of its own, not to be confused with its neighbors: Arceus, Michina Town, the Jewel of Life, the elemental Plates and time travel. Darkrai, Alamos Town and Oración belong to the tenth movie; the Reverse World, Shaymin and Zero to the eleventh. Here, the threat isn't a cosmic accident: it's a grudge.

The Plot: A Broken Promise

Ash, Brock and Dawn stop in Michina Town, a small settlement built at the foot of ancient ruins. They've barely arrived when a space-time vortex opens above the town: Dialga appears in response, Giratina believes it's responsible and attacks it, and the two dragons nearly tear the valley apart. Sheena, a young woman who can communicate telepathically with Pokémon, manages to calm them down.

The ruins tell the rest of the story. Long ago, a meteor crashed down on Michina and Arceus saved the region, losing in the process the Plates from which it draws its power. The king of the land, Damos, gave them back; moved, Arceus entrusted him with five of its Plates — Water, Grass, Electric, Ground and Dragon — fused into a Jewel of Life meant to restore the land's fertility, on the understanding that Damos would return it when the time came.

Damos never gave it back. Arceus, betrayed and attacked by the king's Pokémon, withdrew into its own dimension, vowing to return, and Sheena, a descendant of Damos, owns the instrument that tells the exact time of that return. It's only a few hours away.

What follows is a race: a people trying to atone for a wrong that's centuries old, facing a creature whose anger has spanned the ages. The movie saves for its final act what becomes of that vengeance, and we won't give anything away here — except that Dialga ends up having its say on the matter of time.

Arceus, Said to Have Created Everything

Arceus is a Normal-type Mythical Pokémon, No. 493 in the National Pokédex — the last of the fourth generation, and the last Pokémon in the Pokédex of its day. Its white, equine silhouette, ringed by a golden wheel, borrows from the creator god Brahma bearing the Vedas, from the qilin of Chinese mythology and from the Buddhist wheels of Dharma. Our feature on regional legends and mythologies takes a closer look at these borrowings.

Its in-game mechanics come straight from the movie. Arceus changes type depending on the Plate it holds: holding the Splash Plate, it becomes Water-type; holding the Draco Plate, it becomes Dragon-type. And it's the only Pokémon that can learn Judgment, a special move whose type also follows the Plate it holds. The movie takes this rule literally: it's by giving up five of its Plates that Arceus grows weaker.

The movie presents it as the rarest and most powerful creature in the entire bestiary, the one said to be the origin of the world. It's a status the franchise has always handled cautiously in the games, where the myth is told through tablets and legends rather than stated outright; our guide to Legendary and Mythical Pokémon breaks down this hierarchy.

🚗 With the Splash Plate, Arceus becomes Water-type; with the Draco Plate, it becomes Dragon-type. Hanging from your rearview mirror, the same idea of a small piece you unhook and swap out takes the form of a car pendant.

This is its very first appearance on screen, in three of its type forms. The movie also marks the debut of Heatran and of a Pichu with a mismatched ear, which we'll come back to later. It wasn't until Pokémon Legends: Arceus, thirteen years later, that the games finally dared to put its name in a title.

Dialga, Palkia and Giratina, Together at Last

Sinnoh's creation trio had never shared top billing before. Dialga controls time, Palkia space, Giratina antimatter: three faces of a single myth, drawn from the region's games and covered in detail in our feature on Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. The movie treats them as a difficult set of siblings rather than as adversaries.

Their opening clash, incidentally, rests on a misunderstanding, which has become the trilogy's signature. Giratina attacks Dialga, believing it responsible for the vortex, just as Alamos Town had wrongly blamed Darkrai two movies earlier. Three movies, three unjust accusations: the repetition starts to look like a thesis.

Against Arceus, however, the three dragons don't stand much of a chance. The movie takes care to show that the trio's combined power isn't enough, which establishes Arceus's place in the hierarchy in a single shot. It's an efficient way to make credible a character everyone had been talking about for three years without ever seeing it.

Finally, it's worth noting that Dialga plays a much more active role here than in the two previous installments. It's Dialga that makes the heart of the movie possible, by opening the door that Sheena and the group will step through.

The First Time Ash Travels Back in Time

This is the movie's big first, and it's worth stating precisely. Ash's friends had already traveled through time earlier in the series; he never had. This twelfth feature film is the first time the Trainer himself is sent into the past, alongside Brock, Dawn and Sheena. The character's full journey is covered in our feature on Ash and the Pokémon anime.

The device serves a narrative ambition that's fairly bold for a movie aimed at children: the point isn't to witness history, but to correct it. The first jump lands the group at the exact moment of the betrayal; they'll have to attempt a second one, a few hours earlier, to have any hope of changing anything.

The movie also draws its best dramatic twist from it: the legend everyone has repeated for centuries may not be the truth. Damos, branded a traitor by his own descendants, doesn't remember ever meaning to betray anyone. Clearing the name of a slandered ancestor is an unusual subject for the franchise, and the movie doesn't treat it lightly.

The device naturally comes with its paradoxes, which the movie resolves with unapologetic nonchalance. It's better to watch it for what it is — a mythological tale — than for the rigor of its time-travel mechanics.

Sheena, Damos, Marcus: The Faces of Michina

The traveling trio hasn't changed since the tenth movie: Ash is joined by Brock and Dawn, and this is their third feature film together: the trio will reunite one last time the following year, in Zoroark: Master of Illusions. There's no sign of May or Max, who have been gone since the ninth movie — people often mix up this period, but there's no reason to.

Sheena is the movie's central human character. A descendant of Damos, she communicates telepathically with Pokémon and carries the guilt for a wrong she didn't commit. Kevin, who guards the ruins of Michina with her, is at her side. They, not Ash, carry the story's moral stakes.

Damos, the king of the legend, is the most interesting character of the bunch: a man history condemned and the movie invites us to judge again. Opposite him, Marcus is the human antagonist, Damos's right-hand man in governing the lands of Michina, who enslaves Pokémon with control armor and justifies everything in the name of saving his country. The trilogy thus had no antagonist in the first installment, a misanthrope in the second and a manipulator in the third.

The movie also slips a few familiar faces into the background: Cynthia and Palmer make an appearance, as do the characters from Alamos Town and the Reverse World mentioned earlier. The Team Rocket trio plays a decisive role of its own, without meaning to, by getting hold of an object whose importance it fails to grasp.

Production and Music: Greece and an Eclipse

The team is the same as for the whole trilogy: Kunihiko Yuyama directing, Hideki Sonoda on the screenplay, Shinji Miyazaki on the music, produced by OLM. The movie runs 94 minutes.

True to the studio's usual method, the team went scouting a real country before designing a fictional place. The director and producers traveled to Greece in August 2008: Michina and its ruins borrow from the Acropolis of Athens and the sites of Mycenae and Delphi, while the rocky pinnacle the town sits on comes straight from Meteora. The bridge the group gazes at in the movie's very last scene is the Rio–Antirrio Bridge, which links mainland Greece to the Peloponnese.

After Barcelona for the tenth movie and Norway for the eleventh, this third European scouting trip rounds out the trilogy's visual identity: three movies, three real countries, three styles of architecture, each carrying a different mythology. No other period in the series has been this consistent on that front.

A celestial coincidence accompanied the release. The movie uses a solar eclipse as the omen of Arceus's return — and the longest eclipse of the 21st century was visible from Japan on July 22, 2009, just four days after the premiere. You could hardly dream up better promotion.

On the music side, the French version opens with Oui, fonce! ("Yes, Go for It!") and closes with three songs, including Changeons l'histoire ("Let's Change History"), whose title alone sums up the movie's entire agenda.

The Movie That Unlocks HeartGold and SoulSilver

This is where the twelfth movie truly stands apart from its two predecessors. Its event distributions didn't point to the Sinnoh games, but to the Johto remakes, Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, released in Japan a few weeks after the movie. The feature thus looks ahead to the next generation of games as much as it closes out its own — a nod reinforced by the appearance of the three Johto starters in Michina's past.

The Arceus distributed in Japanese theaters and at certain retailers abroad knew four moves: Roar of Time, Spacial Rend, Shadow Force and Judgment — the signature moves of Dialga, Palkia, Giratina and its own. Transferred to HeartGold or SoulSilver and placed at the head of your party at the Ruins of Alph, it triggered a teleport to the Sinjoh Ruins, where you left with the Egg of one of Sinnoh's three dragons, at level 1.

The second distribution is more low-key and just as clever. A Shiny Pichu was given to Japanese moviegoers who had booked their tickets in advance; brought to the Ilex Forest shrine in HeartGold or SoulSilver, it made the Spiky-eared Pichu appear, a unique form recognizable by its mismatched ear — the very one that debuts in the movie. Our feature on baby Pokémon and pre-evolutions takes a closer look at this one-off case.

In other words, this is the movie whose promotional items left the most lasting mark on the games. The Sinjoh Ruins exist only because a movie Arceus could be brought there; it's one of the rare pieces of main-series content that was never accessible without going through an event.

The French Release, and What Remains of It

France was particularly well served for this movie, which isn't all that common in this series. It aired on French television on December 3, 2009, then came out on DVD on December 11, 2009 — a full week before the Japanese DVD release, scheduled for December 18. For once, French audiences didn't have to wait years: a few months were enough. The release came with an Arceus collector card, completing the set that began with Darkrai and continued with Regigigas.

📇 The French DVD from December 2009 came with its Arceus collector card, the third in the set after Darkrai and Regigigas. If all three are still tucked away at the bottom of a case at home, our Pokémon card storage will keep their corners from getting bent.

In the United States, the movie aired on Cartoon Network as early as November 20, 2009. It's the first Pokémon feature film released in America the same year as in Japan, making 2009 the first year two Pokémon movies reached the United States — the eleventh in February, this one in November.

The French version, recorded in Belgium like the rest of the trilogy, keeps its usual voice cast: Aurélien Ringelheim as Ash, Alexandra Corréa as Dawn, Antoni Lo Presti as Brock, joined by Benoît Grimmiaux as Arceus, Maïa Baran as Sheena, Martin Spinhayer as Damos and Romain Barbieux as Marcus. Voice direction is by Jean-Marc Delhausse.

One detail is a reminder that the movie isn't entirely gentle: in Switzerland, it was reportedly not recommended for viewers under sixteen, because of its violence and its religious references. We are, after all, talking about a betrayed creator god who comes back to wipe out a people, which isn't the usual fare for a children's summer movie.

What remains is a movie that neatly closes the series' only connected trilogy and dares to try ideas the franchise would never revisit: a founding myth called into question, an ancestor vindicated, and a hero who changes the past instead of saving the present. The following movies would go back to standalone adventures, and the series would never try the experiment again.

Arceus and the Jewel of Life at a Glance

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is the exact French title of the twelfth Pokémon movie?
  The official French title is Pokémon: Arceus et le Joyau de Vie. It follows the English title, Arceus and the Jewel of Life, while the Japanese title translates more closely as "Arceus: Toward a Transcended Space-Time." The movie was released in Japan on July 18, 2009.
• Do you need to have seen the two previous movies?
  It's strongly recommended. This movie concludes the Sinnoh trilogy that began with The Rise of Darkrai and continued with Giratina and the Sky Warrior. It brings together the three dragons seen in the first two installments and brings back several of their supporting characters, such as Alice, Tonio, Zero and Newton Graceland.
• What is the Jewel of Life?
  It's an object Arceus created from five of its elemental Plates — Water, Grass, Electric, Ground and Dragon — and entrusted to King Damos to restore the fertility of the Michina region, on the understanding that he would give it back. Breaking that promise is what unleashes Arceus's wrath and drives the entire plot of the movie.
• Is this Arceus's first appearance in a movie?
  Yes. The twelfth movie is Arceus's very first appearance on screen, in several of its type forms. The Pokémon had existed in the games since Diamond and Pearl in 2006, but remained available almost exclusively through event distributions.
• Who travels with Ash in this movie?
  Ash travels with Brock and Dawn, as in the other two installments of the Sinnoh trilogy. It's their third feature film together, before a fourth and final one in 2010 with Zoroark: Master of Illusions. May and Max, companions from the Hoenn-era movies, don't appear.
• What's the movie's connection to HeartGold and SoulSilver?
  The event distributions tied to the movie pointed to these Johto remakes. An Arceus given out in theaters, once transferred and placed at the head of your party at the Ruins of Alph, gave access to the Sinjoh Ruins, where you could obtain the Egg of a level 1 Dialga, Palkia or Giratina. A Shiny Pichu given out with advance ticket orders, meanwhile, let you encounter the Spiky-eared Pichu at the Ilex Forest shrine.
• When was the movie released in France?
  It aired on French television on December 3, 2009, then came out on DVD on December 11, 2009, with an Arceus collector card. The French DVD therefore came out a week before the Japanese one, which is exceptional for this series, where French releases usually came very late.

In short