Pokémon the Movie: Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel — the last Pokémon movie before the reboot

July 2016: the Pokémon movies close out the Kalos era in a kingdom of gears. The saga's nineteenth feature film literally chains Ash to Volcanion, a Mythical Pokémon that hates humans, and sends the two partners off to rescue a five-hundred-year-old automaton. It's the longest movie of the XY cycle, the last one before the big shift of 2017 — and, in a recent twist, the only one from that period to finally make it into French theaters.

Contents

• July 2016: the last chapter of the Kalos era
• The plot: two belts and a kingdom of gears
• Volcanion, the steam-powered Mythical Pokémon
• Magearna, the Mechanical Marvel of the title
• The Azoth Kingdom and the Mega Wave
• The Kalos trio, Squishy, and two faces from the anime
• Production, music and French dub
• Reception and box office results
• The French release: Canal J in 2016, theaters in 2025
• In the games, and what the movie leaves behind
• Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel at a glance
• Frequently Asked Questions

July 2016: the last chapter of the Kalos era

The movie hit Japanese theaters on July 16, 2016, distributed by Toho. It closes the trilogy that began two years earlier with Diancie and the Cocoon of Destruction and continued with Hoopa and the Clash of Ages: three feature films in three years, all built around the Kalos region and the games Pokémon X and Y. Japan's summer release slot, meanwhile, didn't budge an inch between 1998 and 2016 — only the twenty-third and final movie would leave summer behind, in December 2020, as detailed in our overview of the twenty-three Pokémon movies.

Kunihiko Yuyama directed, Atsuhiro Tomioka wrote the screenplay and Shinji Miyazaki composed the music, with Aya Aoshima as director of photography and studio OLM handling production. The full Japanese title, ポケモン・ザ・ムービーXY&Z ボルケニオンと機巧のマギアナ, explicitly places the movie under the XY&Z banner, the final season of the cycle.

A rarely noted detail: at 95 minutes, it's the longest of the three Kalos-era movies, and one of the longest in the saga. That extra breathing room shows: where the previous movie piled on Legendaries, this one takes the time to build a setting, a royal family and a real villain.

The movie was announced as early as the August issue of CoroCoro, with a trailer shown in Japanese theaters after the eighteenth movie. Successive leaks in the magazine then revealed Zygarde and Volcanion, and then, in March 2016, Magearna.

The plot: two belts and a kingdom of gears

The movie opens with a failed breakout. Volcanion sneaks aboard an Azoth Kingdom airship to free Magearna, an artificial creature held captive. He fails, gets hurled out into the open sky and takes with him a strange belt thrown by one of the henchmen.

Meanwhile, Ash and Clemont are having a quiet battle down below. Volcanion crashes right next to them in a cloud of dust, a second belt latches onto Ash, and the two devices lock onto each other through electromagnetism. The Trainer and the Mythical Pokémon find themselves physically bound, a few meters apart, with no way to separate.

The problem is that Volcanion loathes humans and has no intention of waiting around. So he drags Ash along with him all the way to the Azoth Kingdom, a fully mechanized city where a corrupt minister, Alva, has seized Magearna and has his eyes on much more. Princess Kimia, for her part, has known the automaton since childhood.

What Alva really wants is the Soul-Heart, the energy source that keeps Magearna alive — and what he plans to do with it is anything but harmless. The rest, including the decisive role played by a small green Pokémon hidden in Bonnie's bag, is best discovered on screen: we'll stop here.

Volcanion, the steam-powered Mythical Pokémon

Volcanion is a sixth-generation Mythical Pokémon, and it holds a distinction that still stands: it's the only Fire- and Water-type Pokémon in the National Pokédex. Of the 1,025 species recorded to date, no other combines these two types — an exclusive the series has never repeated.

The idea is a living steam engine. Volcanion stores water in its body, heats it with the fire it produces and expels the steam through the two pipes on its back, powerfully enough to launch itself into the air or level a mountain. Its signature move, Steam Eruption, stems directly from this anatomy.

💨 The two pipes on Volcanion's back blast out enough steam to level a mountain; at your place, the steam just fogs up the mirror, and that's already a good reason to put a Pokémon bath mat under your wet feet.

The movie makes constant use of this mechanism, but above all it uses the character to raise a question that runs through the whole saga: what happens when a Pokémon has good reasons to hate humans? Volcanion isn't a misguided antagonist or an angry god; he's a protector who has seen what people do to the creatures they get their hands on.

His forced partnership with Ash is therefore the real engine of the story, and it's what best sets this movie apart from the two before it: the story rests on a duo, not a catalog. Ash's journey, region by region, is traced in our feature on the Trainer from Pallet Town.

Magearna, the Mechanical Marvel of the title

Magearna is the Artificial Pokémon: a Steel- and Fairy-type creature, built by human hands five hundred years ago according to the movie's official synopsis. It isn't born, it's built — which makes it a special case in a universe where even synthetic creatures like Mewtwo come from tampering with living matter.

What powers it has a name, and that name is also its Ability in the games: the Soul-Heart. The movie turns it into a very concrete object of desire, an energy source that can be ripped out and plugged in elsewhere, which gives the plot an unusually mechanical flavor for the saga.

For players, the key point lies elsewhere. Magearna doesn't belong to the Kalos generation: it's the 801^st entry in the Pokédex, which makes it a seventh-generation creature, the generation of Pokémon Sun and Moon, released four months after the movie. So it appeared on screen before a single player could encounter it in a game.

It's a long-standing habit, and one of the saga's most consistent: showcase a creature on the big screen to launch it, then distribute it in the current games. Lugia paved the way back in 1999, shown on screen four months before Pokémon Gold and Silver arrived; Magearna is one of the most polished examples, since the movie serves as a trailer for an entire generation.

The Azoth Kingdom and the Mega Wave

The Azoth Kingdom is the movie's real supporting character: a vertical city of gears, walkways and mechanisms, where medieval alchemy has taken the place of modern technology. The name itself is an alchemical term, and the whole setting plays on this reference, right down to the names of Alva's servants.

The city has developed an invention with serious consequences: the Mega Wave, which can trigger a Mega Evolution without a Key Stone or a Mega Stone, and therefore without the bond of trust between a Trainer and their Pokémon that the series usually presents as essential. It's a deliberate violation of the sixth generation's flagship mechanic.

Against Alva, the movie sets a family: Princess Kimia, the kingdom's queen and an heir who has let himself be manipulated. The setup is classic, but it gives the movie a backbone the previous one lacked, with a human villain pursuing a clear goal rather than an entity of pure rage.

The movie also slips in a meadow the minister wants to raze, and that's where the story's environmental stakes come into play — a motif the movie series has repeated since its beginnings, from Celebi's sanctuary to the Okoya Forest of Secrets of the Jungle.

The Kalos trio, Squishy, and two faces from the anime

Ash travels with Serena, Clemont and Bonnie, the trio of companions from the XY series. It's the most reliable way to tell the neighboring movies apart: neither Brock, Misty nor Dawn appears in the Kalos feature films. The teams have also changed a lot since the first movie of the cycle.

Ash now fields Pikachu, Greninja, Talonflame, Hawlucha and Noivern; Serena has her Braixen, her Pancham and a Sylveon; Clemont keeps his Chespin, his Bunnelby, his Luxray and the Dedenne that never leaves Bonnie's side.

The movie's most important stowaway is Squishy, the little green core that Bonnie has carried in her bag since the series. It's a form of Zygarde, the third Legendary of Kalos, capable of reassembling into its 10% Forme and then its Complete Forme. The movie gives it one of its best showcases.

🎒 Squishy, the green Zygarde core that can reassemble all the way to its Complete Forme, has been riding in Bonnie's bag since the series: now it's your turn to pick, from our Pokémon backpacks and school bags, the one that will take your own stowaway to class.

The opening sequence, for its part, ties directly into the TV series by showing Alain's Gym battle against Korrina — which pins down exactly where the movie sits in the XY&Z timeline. As for Team Rocket, this time they work directly for Alva, which pulls them a little out of their usual troublemaker role.

Production, music and French dub

The score is by Shinji Miyazaki, the longtime composer of the Pokémon movies, and the international version — from which the French version is derived — relies on Ed Goldfarb's arrangements. In France, the movie opens with the theme song Je suis fier and closes with L'Animacœur, a song written especially for the movie about the mechanical heart at its core, the Soul-Heart.

The French-language dub was recorded in Belgium, with the team that has voiced the series for years: Aurélien Ringelheim as Ash, Sophie Frison as Serena, Thibaut Delmotte as Clemont, Elsa Poisot as Bonnie, Martin Spinhayer as Volcanion and Bruno Mullenaerts as Alva.

Visually, the movie goes further than its predecessors in blending traditional animation and CGI: the Azoth Kingdom's mechanisms, gears and flying machines are modeled in 3D, giving the city a depth unusual for the saga. That also partly explains its more generous running time.

Reception and box office results

In Japan, the movie grossed 2.15 billion yen at the box office, according to Eiren's annual statistics. The $20 million figure often quoted is a conversion whose source doesn't state the exchange rate, and it doesn't match Box Office Mojo's Japan line, which stops at $15.9 million: the yen figure is the one to go by. It's the lowest gross of the three Kalos-era movies, and it confirms a steady decline: 2.91 billion for Diancie, 2.61 for Hoopa, 2.15 for Volcanion.

Outside Japan, the movie earned just under $5.9 million, from theaters in China, South Korea and Hong Kong: $3.86 million in China, $1.85 million in South Korea and $162,000 in Hong Kong. That still doesn't add up to a worldwide total, since Box Office Mojo's total counts only the Chinese line of the three. Pokémon movies remain a Japanese event first and foremost, and it's the in-game distributions, far more than ticket sales, that justify the whole operation on a global scale.

It's also the movie where you can feel the saga reaching the end of a formula. The "Ash, his three current companions, a brand-new Mythical Pokémon and a human villain" template had been running for nearly twenty years by then. The following year, the series would decide to wipe the slate clean.

The French release: Canal J in 2016, theaters in 2025

In France, the movie first aired on television, on November 11, 2016 on Canal J, then a week later, on November 18, 2016, on Gulli. Just four months after Japan: for the saga, that's an exceptionally short wait, considering the fourth movie didn't reach France until 2007.

In the United States, it aired on December 5, 2016. No theatrical release was planned in France at the time — since Pokémon 3: Spell of the Unown in June 2001, the saga had reached French audiences only through DVD, television and later streaming.

Which is what makes the next chapter so satisfying. Nine years after its Japanese release, the movie made its first appearance in French cinemas on November 22 and 23, 2025, during special event screenings organized by The Pokémon Company International in the MK2 and Kinepolis chains. The screenings came with a new episode of the POKÉTOON shorts series, Kangaskhan to the Rescue.

It wasn't a regular theatrical run, but an event limited to two days, unrelated to the original release. That doesn't change the overall picture: the only three movies in the saga truly released in French theaters are still the first three, which came out between April 2000 and June 2001.

In the games, and what the movie leaves behind

Volcanion was distributed in France by code from October 27 to 31, 2016 at Paris Games Week, then from October 31, 2016 in Micromania stores, for all sixth-generation versions. The code remained valid until January 31, 2017. It came at level 70, in a Cherish Ball, with Steam Eruption and holding an Assault Vest. In Belgium, the distribution ran from October 10 to November 30, 2016.

🧥 The Volcanion distributed at Micromania came at level 70 holding an Assault Vest; yours, the one you can actually put on, is more likely to be found among our Pokémon jackets.

Magearna, for its part, opened up an entirely different channel: a special QR Code to scan in Pokémon Sun and Moon via the Pokémon TV app, available from December 7, 2016 with no end date. The only condition: you had to have already beaten the League. In Japan, a separate QR Code had been handed out in movie theaters, printed on a disc for the Pokémon Ga-Olé arcade machine.

That leaves the movie's special place in the saga, and it deserves to be spelled out clearly. It's the last Pokémon feature film to follow the continuity of the TV series as it had existed since 1997. The next movie, I Choose You!, rewrites the first meeting between Ash and Pikachu and opens an alternate continuity that the movie series would never leave again.

For viewers, it makes a fitting farewell: the last "old-school" movie, with the companions of the time, a brand-new Mythical Pokémon and an adventure that stands on its own. No prerequisites: not the XY series, not the two Kalos movies that came before it.

Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel at a glance

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is the exact French title of the nineteenth Pokémon movie?
  Its French title is Pokémon, le film: Volcanion et la merveille mécanique (in English, Pokémon the Movie: Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel). The Japanese title, ボルケニオンと機巧のマギアナ, literally means Volcanion and the Magearna of Mechanisms: the French version keeps the idea but replaces the automaton's name with the phrase "la merveille mécanique" ("the mechanical marvel").
• Was the movie released in theaters in France?
  Not when it first came out. In France, it aired on television on November 11, 2016 on Canal J, then on November 18, 2016 on Gulli. It did, however, get its very first French theatrical screenings on November 22 and 23, 2025, during a limited event organized by The Pokémon Company International in MK2 and Kinepolis cinemas, paired with the POKÉTOON short Kangaskhan to the Rescue.
• What is Magearna?
  Magearna is the Artificial Pokémon, a Steel- and Fairy-type, presented in the movie as a creature built by humans five hundred years ago. It is powered by an energy source called the Soul-Heart, which is also the name of its Ability in the games. It is number 801 in the National Pokédex and therefore belongs to the seventh generation, that of Pokémon Sun and Moon, released four months after the movie.
• Is Volcanion really the only Fire- and Water-type Pokémon?
  Yes. Of the 1,025 species in the National Pokédex, Volcanion is the only one that combines the Fire and Water types. This dual typing comes from its anatomy: it stores water in its body, heats it and expels the steam through the pipes on its back, which also gives it its signature move, Steam Eruption.
• Do you need to have seen the other Kalos movies to understand this one?
  No. Like nearly every Pokémon feature film, this one is written to be watched on its own. All you need to know is that Ash travels with Serena, Clemont and Bonnie, and that Bonnie carries a small green Pokémon named Squishy in her bag, a form of Zygarde from the TV series. No plot thread ties it to Diancie and the Cocoon of Destruction or to Hoopa and the Clash of Ages.
• How could you get Volcanion and Magearna in the games?
  Volcanion was distributed in France by code, from October 27 to 31, 2016 at Paris Games Week and then from October 31, 2016 in Micromania stores, for all sixth-generation versions, with the code remaining valid until January 31, 2017. Magearna was offered differently: through a special QR Code to scan in Pokémon Sun and Moon via the Pokémon TV app, starting December 7, 2016, provided you had beaten the League.
• Why is it called the last "classic" Pokémon movie?
  Because it's the last feature film in the saga to follow the continuity of the TV series that has aired since 1997, with Ash's companions of the time. The next movie, Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You!, released in 2017, rewrites the first meeting between Ash and Pikachu and opens an alternate continuity, independent of the series' timeline.

In short