The release of Avengers: Endgame, now just weeks away, kicks off 2019’s summer movie season. This year, we’re foregoing a traditional summer movie preview -- a single list-style film preview -- in favor of a month-long series of IGN First summer movie spotlights, featuring exclusive video debuts, image reveals, interviews and more.

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu Movie Images 5 IMAGES

Why Mr. Mime Is in the Movie

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A Real Mime Was Consulted

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The Mr. Mime Scene Was Almost Cut

Mr. Mime Was Almost Too Freaky to Appear in the Movie

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Mr. Mime Presented an Incredible Design Challenge

Every Pokemon in the Detective Pikachu Movie 40 IMAGES

IGN First is IGN's editorially-driven month-long spotlight of exclusives around upcoming film titles that both our audience -- and our staff! -- are excited about. We'll be rolling out exclusives on some of the most exciting new movies opening between the beginning of May until the end of August, so make sure to check back for even more exclusives throughout April.Today, we have an exclusive new image from Pokémon: Detective Pikachu , Legendary Pictures', Warner Bros. Pictures' and The Pokémon Company's comedy adventure based on the beloved media franchise. It is the first-ever live-action adaptation of the Pokémon brand.While many of the “live-action” Pokemon in the upcoming Detective Pikachu movie could be described as cute, cuddly, or ferocious, one in particular sent a collective shiver down fans’ spines: Mr. Mime. Most Pokemon resemble various pets, beasts, and creatures, but Mr. Mime is a tiny person missing just enough human-like qualities, like a nose, that technically make it a Pokemon. We always accepted this because of Pokemon’s cartoony nature, but bringing it into the real world made us take a second, horrifying look at what it really is.It turns out that the film’s director, Rob Letterman, had to go through quite an ordeal to use Mr. Mime in the film, even going so far as to need approval from the president of the Pokemon company. IGN talked to Letterman about his quest to bring Mr. Mime to life, and it’s a story that’s just as unexpected and ridiculous as Mr. Mime itself.The process of getting Mr. Mime in the movie took two years because it was one of the first ideas Letterman came up with while reading the video game script for Detective Pikachu on which the movie is (loosely) based. In the game, the player must interact with a Mr. Mime to obtain an item, and Letterman had just been watching the Brad Pitt-starring thriller Seven where they interrogate the bad guy, so it gave him an idea.“I thought it would be really funny if we played that classic film noir detective interrogation scene, but with Mr. Mime,” Letterman recalled.Being careful not to spoil anything from the movie, Letterman shared the reason why protagonist Tim Goodman and Detective Pikachu need to interrogate Mr. Mime in the first place.“In their search for Tim's missing father, [they learn his father] had an informant at the docks,” Letterman explained. “So they go down to the docks, which is kind of creepy part of town, and they bump into this Mr. Mime character and it recognizes Pikachu, then they realize wait a minute, Pikachu is his father's old partner. He recognizes him. They put two and two together and realize the father's informant was actually a Pokemon. So they run down the Mime and do like a classic police interrogation scene ripped out of every detective movie I could think of, but flipped on its head. Because the uncooperative informant that they're interviewing happens to be a mime.”As you’ve no doubt seen from the Detective Pikachu trailer, Mr. Mime is one tricky customer to interrogate. Instead of speaking, it pantomimes its responses, often to comedic effect. To orchestrate the scene, Letterman worked with a real mime he was a big fan of named Trigby, who is based out of New Zealand. After coming up with some good gags, Letterman scripted the scene and brought it to Ryan Reynolds (the voice of Detective Pikachu) and Justice Smith, who plays Tim, and rehearsed it with Trigby playing the role of Mr. Mime.However, on the day of shooting, it was just Smith acting the scene out all by himself, with both Pikachu and Mr. Mime being special effects. Smith had to act across from a man wearing a green suit, but because the man was twice the size of Mr. Mime, they pasted Mr. Mime’s eyeballs on his stomach so Justice had an eye-line.“It was the most awkward, weird thing to shoot. Just reenacting it for you now is making my head explode. It was bizarre,” Letterman recalled.“Full disclosure, I thought no way in a million years would [the Mr. Mime scene] work. Honestly. It was so weird. I wanted to cut it at one point, because I was like this can't possibly work. It's insane,” Letterman admitted.But, he kept at it, and once others saw the bit, it gave him confidence to keep it in the movie, “Then we just started showing it to people and people were losing their minds. They were just cracking up and it was so out there. It became one of the standout scenes. We did previews of the movie, people were cheering to see that section. Which is really weird.”Let’s be real, it’s not just that Mr. Mime is essentially a little Pokemon-person that makes it, to put it bluntly, nightmare fuel. It’s the tiny details like the freckles and peach fuzz on its smooth face, and the fact that its “outfit” is actually part of its body, which means those dodgeballs on its shoulders are made of flesh. That, more than anything, is why Letterman had to clear so many hurdles to get Mr. Mime in the movie, taking him to the tippy top of the Pokemon empire to get approval.“The most uncomfortable question was me asking permission to put [Mr. Mime] into the movie, because I went to The Pokemon Company. I was like I have this idea for this scene, and it requires realizing Mr. Mime photoreal into the live-action world. They thought about it, and [based on all the reasons listed above], they literally looked at me, like yeah you don't wanna do that. That's not gonna work. That's gonna be too weird. That's gonna be creepy. For all those reasons, it can't work. It came to the point where I literally had to ask the President of the whole Pokemon Company, Ishihara-san. I gave him the whole pitch, and he started laughing, and he's like okay, give it a shot,” Letterman said.“[Mr. Mime] basically broke all the rules of what's going on in our movie,” Letterman told us. “To give you some insight, Pikachu for example, or the Bulbasaurs or Charizards, there's so much real-world design going into those very simple characters. Pikachu we tried to stay true to the silhouette of a Pikachu. While at the same time putting in realistic fur. There's realistic muscle systems and there's skeletal systems, there's eyeball systems. The fur simulates and interacts, and when it gets wet it gets wet. There's all this technology that goes into bringing those Pokemon characters to life. Because we're basing them on real-world physics. Then comes in Mr. Mime, which is bonkers because you can't do any of that stuff with it. So we thought okay, how do we get some sort of sense of photo real texturing in without breaking the Mr. Mime kind of cartoon nature of him?“That led to a lot of discussions of he's a clown, he's a mime clown, what would clowns wear? They would be dressed up in these clown suits. Well those spheres for shoulders, what if they were rubber balls, like the kind you play kickball with? The hands are made of those balloons that kind of have that metallic balloon plastic. Everything started to build. The face became this weird thing. It was such a fine line from disturbing to funny. So we were dancing back and forth with adding a little bit of hair to break it up so it didn't have a plastic feel, but not too much skin texture so it didn't feel like a human being with a deformed face. It went on forever until we finally landed on what you could describe as funny and disturbing.”For more IGN Firsts, check out our exclusive poster for Child's Play , a behind the scenes look at Hobbs & Shaw , our preview for the upcoming Conjuring universe entry Annabelle Comes Home and for Tolkien , a biopic of the Lord of the Rings author starring Nicholas Hoult and Lilly Collins.

Joshua is Senior Editor of IGN Comics. If Pokemon, Green Lantern, or Game of Thrones are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter @JoshuaYehl and IGN