Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai: the movie that opens the Sinnoh trilogy

An entire town vanishes into a parallel dimension, and the designated culprit had nothing to do with it. Released in Japan on July 14, 2007, Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai is the tenth feature film in the series, the first of the fourth generation, and above all the first chapter of the only trilogy whose plots lead directly from one film into the next. A turning-point film in every sense of the word: a new region, a new companion, a new generation of games, and a story that, for the first time, calls for a sequel.

Contents

• July 2007: Sinnoh Takes the Stage
• The First Chapter of the Series' Only True Trilogy
• The Plot: A Town Caught Between Two Gods
• Darkrai, the Mythical Pokémon Everyone Blames
• Dialga and Palkia: Time Versus Space
• Enter Dawn
• Production and Music: Gaudí, Barcelona and Ronda
• Reception, Box Office and Releases
• The French Release: TV First, DVD Later
• What It Left Behind
• The Rise of Darkrai at a Glance
• Frequently Asked Questions

July 2007: Sinnoh Takes the Stage

The film opened in Japanese theaters on July 14, 2007, keeping the summer date the series had held since 1998. Its original title, ディアルガVSパルキアVSダークライ, is refreshingly blunt: "Dialga VS Palkia VS Darkrai." It promises a three-way battle, and it delivers. Our complete guide to the Pokémon movies places this tenth installment within the series as a whole.

It is the first feature film of the fourth generation, the generation of Sinnoh and the Nintendo DS, and our guide to Pokémon Diamond and Pearl details its overhaul. The games had come out in Japan in late 2006; the film arrived a few months later, at the exact moment audiences were discovering Dialga, Palkia and the mythology of Spear Pillar. The timing was no coincidence.

The French title, Pokémon: L'ascension de Darkrai, mirrors the English-language title (The Rise of Darkrai) rather than the Japanese one. It puts the spotlight on the one being accused, not the ones doing the fighting — a rather clever translation choice, since that is exactly what the film is about.

The First Chapter of the Series' Only True Trilogy

Out of twenty-three feature films, the Pokémon series has produced only one genuine continuous storyline: movies 10, 11 and 12, made during the Diamond and Pearl era. This tenth film is its starting point, and its role in the whole is precise: it doesn't tell the trilogy's story, it sets it in motion.

What it actually brings to the table comes down to two things. It stages the clash between Dialga and Palkia, and it lets that clash cause damage that the next film will have to repair. Nothing more. Giratina, the Reverse World, Shaymin and Arceus don't appear here: they belong to the later installments, and that is exactly the kind of detail people wrongly mix up from one film to the next.

The link is explicit from the very next film. Giratina and the Sky Warrior opens on the direct aftermath of the battle at Alamos Town, and even goes as far as inserting a flashback to this tenth film — something the series has done nowhere else. The third installment, Arceus and the Jewel of Life, brings all three dragons back to the screen and even brings back some of this film's supporting characters.

In other words, you can perfectly well watch The Rise of Darkrai on its own, like any other Pokémon movie. But it is the only film in the series that can truly be said to have a sequel in the strict sense, and the viewing order matters.

The Plot: A Town Caught Between Two Gods

Ash, Brock and Dawn are on their way to Alamos Town, a garden city built around the Space-Time Towers, to compete in a Pokémon Contest. There they meet Alice, a young woman who acts as their guide. The town is beautiful, green and perched above a ravine — and something is off. Inexplicable phenomena keep multiplying, and the residents are having nightmares.

The explanation lies elsewhere, literally: in another dimension, Dialga and Palkia are locked in a battle that is tearing space-time apart. Palkia, wounded, takes refuge in Alamos Town and drags the entire town into a pocket dimension. The streets fold in on themselves, the residents walk in circles, and the sky tears open above the rooftops.

Then there's the problem of the scapegoat. A Darkrai lives in the town's park, and everyone blames it for the nightmares — first and foremost Baron Alberto, a local bigwig as loud as he is sure of himself. The film takes its time turning this accusation on its head, and that is where it is at its best.

The solution lies in the Space-Time Towers themselves, designed a century earlier by an architect named Godey, and in a melody called Oracion, capable of calming the most terrifying rages. Of course, you still have to reach the top of a tower while the town comes apart around you. The film saves what becomes of Darkrai for its final act — we won't say any more here.

Darkrai, the Mythical Pokémon Everyone Blames

Darkrai is a Dark-type Mythical Pokémon, number 491 in the National Pokédex, introduced in the fourth generation. It forms the lunar duo with Cresselia: one causes nightmares, the other dispels them. Its Ability, Bad Dreams, hurts sleeping opponents, and it is the only Pokémon that can learn Dark Void, a move that puts everything in front of it to sleep.

🌑 Bad Dreams hurts sleepers and Dark Void puts everything in front of it to sleep: Darkrai has a strange idea of bedtime, and our Pokémon pajamas bring far gentler intentions to your nights.

On paper, then, it's the perfect suspect. The film builds its entire message on this misunderstanding: a creature with frightening powers is not necessarily malicious. In the games, Darkrai actually has an ambiguous reputation depending on the title, sometimes a scourge, sometimes a misunderstood loner — our guide to Legendary and Mythical Pokémon takes a closer look at this particular status.

The film is also its very first appearance on screen, and it isn't the only one: twenty species from the fourth generation make their animated debut here, a concentration you only find in the films that open a generation. Infernape, Empoleon, Torterra, Luxray, Gible and many others are seen in motion for the first time.

Finally, Darkrai didn't stay at the movies. An event Darkrai was distributed in Japanese theaters and in various stores elsewhere in the world, with two moves that don't normally belong to it: Roar of Time and Spacial Rend, Dialga's and Palkia's signature moves. A movie souvenir slipped into a game cartridge.

Dialga and Palkia: Time Versus Space

Dialga controls time, Palkia controls space: they are the two mascots of Diamond and Pearl, and the film treats them as forces of nature rather than as characters. They don't speak, they don't negotiate, and they don't care for a second about the humans they crush along the way. It's a deliberate directing choice, and it works.

Their feud drives everything: it's what cracks the dimensions, what pushes Palkia to hold Alamos Town captive, what makes the town's air unbreathable. The film never tries to declare a winner between time and space; it simply shows what happens when two absolutes collide above an inhabited town.

This mythology wasn't invented for the film: it comes straight from the games and the Sinnoh pantheon, which our guide to regional legends and mythologies explores region by region. The film builds on it without ever contradicting it, which is far from always the case in the series.

One detail is worth pointing out: it's the only film of the Diamond and Pearl era without a real human antagonist. Baron Alberto is a nuisance, not a villain. The next two installments will each have one — and that difference in structure jumps out when you watch all three back to back.

Enter Dawn

This is where the trio gets a new line-up. Ash now travels with Brock and Dawn, the Sinnoh Coordinator, in her very first feature-film appearance. May and Max, who were in the four previous films, have left the series: mixing them up from one film to another is the most common mistake about this period, and the easiest to avoid. The hero's full journey is traced in our guide to Ash and the Pokémon anime.

Dawn isn't just there as an extra: she competes in the Alamos Town Pokémon Contest, which is ultimately won by a rival named Allegra, and she leaves the film with a Lunar Wing, the item said to ward off bad dreams. It's an elegant way of tying the film's plot to her ambitions as a Coordinator, rather than relegating her to the role of spectator.

Around them are Alice, a guide and musician, and Tonio, a clumsy researcher and the great-grandson of the towers' architect. The film gives them a quiet romance and an investigation: it's Tonio who figures out what is happening to the town, and Alice who unknowingly holds the musical key to the ending, handed down from her grandmother Alicia.

The Team Rocket trio is there, but stays in the background. The film gives them no decisive role, which fits its tone: Alamos Town is dissolving, and this is no time to steal a Pikachu.

Production and Music: Gaudí, Barcelona and Ronda

The team is the one behind the series' biggest films: Kunihiko Yuyama directing, Hideki Sonoda on the screenplay, Shinji Miyazaki on the music, produced by studio OLM. The film runs 89 minutes, a noticeably tighter format than its predecessor.

Alamos Town doesn't exist, but everything you see in it does. The town is a collage of Barcelona and Ronda, in Andalusia: the Space-Time Towers are directly inspired by the Sagrada Família, the park where Darkrai lives is modeled on Park Güell, the town perched above its gorge and the bridge leading into it come from Ronda, and the mountains in the background evoke the Montserrat massif. The towers' fictional architect is named Godey: the nod to Antoni Gaudí is barely even disguised.

🧩 Sagrada Família for the towers, Park Güell for Darkrai's park, Ronda for the gorge: Alamos Town was assembled piece by piece, and our Pokémon puzzles let you do the same on your coffee table.

The central melody follows the same logic. Oracion takes its name from the word Oración — "prayer" in Spanish — which can be seen carved into one side of the Sagrada Família. A film that finds its musical theme on the facade of the building it used as a model: that's a rare kind of consistency.

One technical point is often misunderstood: this is not the film that took Pokémon movies digital. The feature films made the switch as early as the eighth, Lucario and the Mystery of Mew, in 2005; the last one produced mostly on hand-painted cels was the seventh, Destiny Deoxys, released in 2004. The previous film, Pokémon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea, was therefore already fully digital. Here the technique serves the dimensional distortion effects, which would have been impossible to pull off cleanly by hand.

The film also changed a lot between its promotion and its release. Two sequences shown in the trailers didn't make the final cut: one in which Ash flies over Alamos Town on a Pidgeot, the other in which he comes face to face with a dark version of himself. The second says a lot about the direction the film once considered — a personal nightmare rather than an urban disaster — before it settled on a broader scope.

One last production curiosity: the film's opening theme is the one from the following season, We Will Be Heroes, not the current season's. It was the first time the series had done this. The French ending songs, Je penserai toujours à toi and Exister dans l'ombre, accompany the return to calm.

Reception, Box Office and Releases

In Japan, the film got off to a strong start: number one at the national box office on its opening weekend, ahead of every other film, then six consecutive weeks at the top or just behind among Japanese films. It grossed a total of 5.02 billion yen at the box office — a figure the series wouldn't reach again for quite a while, and its best result since 1999. Eiren's annual statistics rank it as the second-highest-grossing Japanese film of 2007 and sixth among all films. The dollar conversions circulating for this film aren't comparable with one another: English Wikipedia gives $47 million while Box Office Mojo lists $42.5 million; the gap comes from the exchange rate used, not from the box office takings.

Around the release, the event machine was running at full speed. A Deoxys was given to Japanese moviegoers who pre-booked their tickets, and the choice of Pokémon wasn't arbitrary: it had been picked in a public poll among the stars of the previous films. The Darkrai, for its part, could be downloaded at major theaters, with instructions given on screen by Meowth before and after the showing.

In the United States, the film skipped theaters: it aired on Cartoon Network on February 24, 2008, ahead of a home video release. It was the first Pokémon feature film rated PG in the US, a sign that the tone had noticeably darkened. A manga adaptation was also published.

Promotional cards accompanied the Japanese release, in a commemorative series for the tenth film — a ritual detailed in our guide to the Pokémon Trading Card Game. Every film from this period left its mark on cardboard as much as on film.

The French Release: TV First, DVD Later

In France, the film was never released in theaters. It aired on French television on August 10, 2008, then came out on DVD on October 8, 2008, more than a year after the Japanese release. Only the first three feature films in the series got a genuine theatrical release in France, between 2000 and 2001; the later ones arrived on video or TV, with only I Choose You! from November 5 to 17, 2017 and Volcanion, for two special screenings on November 22 and 23, 2025, returning to French theaters.

📼 No movie theater for this tenth film: it reached French television on August 10, 2008, in the middle of summer — the kind of screening you watch at home with bare legs, and our Pokémon shorts are made for exactly that kind of afternoon.

The French edition had its own collector's hook: the DVD came with a Darkrai collector card, a promo from the Diamond and Pearl series. The publisher would repeat the idea for the next two installments, with Regigigas and then Arceus — enough to rebuild the trilogy in three cards.

The French version was recorded in Belgium, like all the films from this period. Aurélien Ringelheim voices Ash, Alexandra Corréa voices Dawn and Antoni Lo Presti voices Brock, a stable cast that would carry through the whole trilogy. The dub was directed by Daniel Nicodème.

Finally, a word on the order in which viewers discovered these films, which is especially tricky for this period. The eleventh film came out on DVD in France just six months after the tenth, in April 2009, whereas a full year separates them in Japan: French audiences therefore discovered the trilogy at a faster pace than anywhere else. The complete guide to the films sets that whole timeline straight.

What It Left Behind

The Rise of Darkrai had a lasting impact on the way the series writes its films. Until then, each feature film was a self-contained bubble: one place, one Mythical Pokémon, one lesson, and it was never mentioned again. From this one on, and for two more films, the consequences outlive the end credits.

It also set a visual template. Scouting architecture in Europe — Barcelona here, Norway for the next film, Greece for the third — became the trilogy's signature, giving these three films a visual identity in their settings that the series had never had before. The regions of the Pokémon world, detailed in our guide to the regions from Kanto to Paldea, had never felt so tangible.

Finally, there's the subject of the film itself: a creature judged on its appearance and its power, before anyone has bothered to look at what it actually does. It's a theme the series has often touched on, but rarely tackled so head-on. The next film carries the torch with Giratina, an even more intimidating ghostly dragon — and even less guilty than it looks.

The Rise of Darkrai at a Glance

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is the exact French title of the tenth Pokémon movie?
  The official French title is Pokémon: L'ascension de Darkrai. It follows the English-language title, The Rise of Darkrai, rather than the Japanese title, which literally reads "Dialga VS Palkia VS Darkrai." The film was released in Japan on July 14, 2007.
• Do you need to have seen the other films to understand this one?
  No. The Rise of Darkrai stands on its own and doesn't require any earlier film. However, it opens the Sinnoh trilogy: you should watch it before Giratina and the Sky Warrior and then Arceus and the Jewel of Life, because those two films build directly on what happens here.
• Do Giratina or Arceus appear in this film?
  No, and it's a common mix-up. The tenth film features Dialga, Palkia and Darkrai, in Alamos Town. Giratina and the Reverse World arrive in the eleventh film, and Arceus in the twelfth. The battle between Dialga and Palkia told here is simply what sets the rest in motion.
• Who travels with Ash in this movie?
  Ash travels with Brock and Dawn. It's the first appearance of Dawn, the Sinnoh Coordinator, in a Pokémon feature film. May and Max, his companions in the four previous films, are no longer part of the adventure.
• What is Oracion?
  Oracion is the melody played from the Space-Time Towers of Alamos Town, capable of calming even the most violent rages. Its name comes from the Spanish word Oración, "prayer," which can be seen carved into one side of Barcelona's Sagrada Família, the building that inspired the film's towers.
• Where was the film shown in France?
  In France, the film aired on television on August 10, 2008, then came out on DVD on October 8, 2008, with a Darkrai collector card. It was never shown in theaters: only the first three Pokémon feature films had a genuine theatrical release in France, in 2000 and 2001. Two much later films returned there for limited runs: I Choose You! from November 5 to 17, 2017, and Volcanion on November 22 and 23, 2025.
• Can you get the movie's Darkrai in the games?
  An event Darkrai was distributed around the film's release, in Japanese theaters and at various retailers abroad. It knew Roar of Time and Spacial Rend, Dialga's and Palkia's signature moves, as a nod to the film's battle. Outside of these distributions, Darkrai remains a Mythical Pokémon that can't be obtained through ordinary means.

In short