Love it when protected gems are released for free

There are so many absolute artistic gems housed away within the walled gardens of various ecosystems. Take Mei and the Kittenbus: a short film and semi-sequel to My Neighbor Totoro. It's a thing that exists, but you can only see it legally on certain months at the Ghibli Museum in Japan.

I get the reasoning behind this to an extent, but it's been 17 years since it debuted and a lot of people don't even know this piece of art exists. So when studios decide to knock down those walls and put up a bunch of their content for free on YouTube, I take notice.

That very thing happened this past week with the announcement of the new Pokemon Mystery Dungeon remake on Switch. As it turns out, The Pokemon Company just put a bunch of specials for the anime on their official YouTube channel: which I'm sure is another thing a lot of people didn't know existed. You can find the original special below, as well as the Infinity special, Sky and Darkness and Time.

A word of warning: these are in Japanese, and the animals actually talk because that's a thing they can do in this universe. Still, a lot of the story is physical in nature, and it's great to see these out in the wild in any case. The whole vibe reminds me of those Pikachu shorts that would play before the Pokemon feature films.

Pokemon Company Japan [YouTube]