Have you ever seen a Venusaur bloom? One morning just before my Ivysaur was about to evolve, I woke up and saw it happen. Bathed in the morning light, each petal slowly opened, one by one… a mystery of nature… a wonder of the Pokémon world… my heart trembled at the sight. Ever since that day, Pokémon have been the center of my universe.
Bill, reflecting on the origin of his Pokémania in Toshihiro Ono’s manga The Electric Tale of Pikachu
I.
Pokémon spawned more than a half-dozen manga series between its initial release in 1996 and the turn of the millennium, with three of these series receiving English-language, North American releases: Hidenori Kusaka’s ongoing Pokémon Adventures, an adaptation of the Game Boy games currently on its 60th volume; Yumi Tsukirino’s über-kawaii Magical Pokémon Journey, aimed at teenaged and preteen girls; and Toshihiro Ono’s The Electric Tale of Pikachu, the first volume of which I read as a child.
“I tried to imagine what the world where Poké Balls were invented would look like,” Ono explained in an interview. Starting from this piece of science fiction technology, which allows Pokémon trainers to capture, transport and materialize their creatures, Ono added inspiration from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and the “wasteful, strange designs” of buildings during Japan’s economic bubble to create a much more futuristic Pokémon world than that of the anime, which The Electric Tale of Pikachu loosely adapts. In the manga’s first chapter, for instance, Ash’s rival Gary rides a levitating hoverbike that could have been produced by Dragon Ball’s Capsule Corp. Viridian City police ride a two-seater hover car; in the epilogue, Team Rocket drive a levitating vehicle that resembles Luke Skywalker’s landspeeder. While Ash, Misty and Brock walk from town to town in the anime, they use a variety of transportation modes in the manga, from a bullet train to various hovercraft to a seacraft that almost resembles a spaceship.
Ono focused on developing his Pokémon world beyond technology, giving it a sense of history and legend often lacking in the games and anime. His fifth manga chapter, for instance, adapts an anime filler episode, “The Flame Pokémon-athon,” in which Ash rides a Ponyta to victory in a Wacky Races-ish race despite Team Rocket’s interference. Ono invents a historical background for this event: it concludes a festival commemorating nomadic earning their independence, presumably the freedom to migrate across the countryside with their herds. “For a week, nearly every member of every nomadic tribe shows up,” as Brock explains to Ash upon their arrival at the festival.
The manga’s nineth chapter, “I’m Your Venusaur,” was originally titled “Kami-sama” or “The God” in Japanese. With Ash and Misty “stopping over in a small town to build up their cash reserves” by working regular jobs, Ash’s Pikachu and Bulbasaur take center stage. They explore the town, whose buildings sit in the shadow of a gigantic tree like presents under a Christmas tree, meeting an Ivysaur who explains that the tree grew from the body of a ‘Venusaur lord’ who once defended the town and remains its ‘guardian spirit.’ (This is, fortunately, one of only two manga chapters in which Pokémon talk.) Curious about the legend, Pikachu and Bulbasaur begin climbing the massive tree, eventually encountering the guardian spirit — ancient, gnarled and overgrown — which saves them from a potentially fatal fall from the branches to the ground below. “Do you think that was the guardian spirit who saved us?” the Ivysaur asks his less evolved acquaintance at the end of the adventure. “I’m sure of it,” replies Bulbasaur.
Ono seems to have drawn on two different anime episodes for this chapter. In episode 10, “Bulbasaur and the Hidden Village,” a Bulbasaur guards a sanctuary for abandoned and unwell Pokémon before joining Ash on his adventure. (The titular ‘village’ is in fact only a single cabin.) In episode 51, “Bulbasaur’s Mysterious Garden,” Ash and the gang happen upon the titular garden, a verdant place, shrouded with glittering pollen, where Bulbasaur go to evolve into Ivysaur. A large Venusaur inhabits a tree at the center of the garden and presides over the mass evolution, which resembles a kind of initiation ceremony. (Ash’s Bulbasaur refuses to evolve but eventually gains the respect of its larger relatives by saving them from the clutches of Team Rocket.) By combining these episodes and adding a sense of history and lore, Ono’s admittedly silly manga chapter evokes one of the most enduring motifs in mythology and the visual arts, a motif I will call the monstrous guardian.
II.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell introduces a figure he calls the threshold guardian, who watches over the boundary between the hero’s normal world and the world of adventure — generally the boundary between civilization and the wilderness. “Folk mythologies,” Campbell writes, “populate with dangerous and deceitful presences every desert place outside the normal traffic of the village.” While I will discuss this character in an upcoming post, what I call the monstrous guardian is a related but distinct character. Instead of menacing a hero passing into some other realm, the monstrous guardian faces the opposite direction. In the form of a statue — or, perhaps more often, a pair of statues — it symbolically protects an enclosed human space such as a church or walled city from human or supernatural intruders. It exemplifies apotropaic magic, magic intended to ward off evil, and perhaps owes its ubiquity to the universal human idea that evil spirits might be frightened away from an even more fearsome-looking creature, like crows from a scarecrow. (Noisemaking to frighten away ghosts, spirits and similar beings is equally ubiquitous across cultures and across time. New year’s fireworks have an ancient, superstitious origin.)
The apotropaic monstrous guardian is unimaginably old; cave paintings of bears and other animals might be the earliest examples. The world’s most famous monstrous guardian, the Great Sphinx at Giza, was built during the reign of the pharaoh Khafre more than 4,500 years ago and is but the largest and most famous example of a motif that lasted throughout millennia of ancient Egyptian art. Cyril Aldred’s book Egyptian Art, for instance, mentions “scenes of the pharaoh as a sphinx or gryphon trampling the enemies of Egypt… so magically protecting the entrance from any evil incursion” in fifth and sixth dynasty valley temples; New Kingdom temples “fully protected from assault by the forces of evil” due to sphinxes, lions and other guardian figures; and limestone lions guarding the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut (c.1470 BC). “Statues of the ruler under the protection of a god incarnate in an animal,” he writes, “continued to be produced up to the very end of Egypt’s history before the Christian era.”
More than a millennium after the Great Sphinx, bronze age Greeks built the Lion Gate at Mycenae, guarded by two lionesses carved out of a single massive rock. In Greek mythology, the goddess Athena and her father Zeus both wore the gorgon Medusa’s severed head on a breastplate or mantle, the aegis. Medusa herself appears as a guardian monster on the exterior of several ancient Greek temples, most famously the 6th century B.C. Temple of Artemis on the island of Corfu.
No visitor to the British Museum could ever forget the gigantic, winged, human-headed stone lions, called lamassu or shedu, which guarded the palace of King Ahurnarsipal II more than 2,800 years ago. (In an echo across time, a pair of much more recent reclining stone lions guard the Montague Place entrance of the British Museum itself.) Similarly, stone dog-lion hybrids called shishi in Chinese and komainu in Japanese guard temples and palaces throughout east Asia. Dating back to Han Dynasty China, these statues guard Buddhist temples, Chinese restaurants and homes throughout the world. (I will discuss shishi further when we get to Growlithe and Arcanine, Pokémon inspired by them.)
Moving to Europe, we’ve already seen the Green Man, who — according to some interpretations, at least — serves as a kind of gargoyle and often appears near more familiar gargoyles on churches and cathedrals. Gargoyles originally had a utilitarian purpose as waterspouts draining rainfall away from cathedral roofs, before artisans reimagined their pipes as the throats of strange creatures. The word “gargoyle” comes from the same root as “gargle” and the French verb gargouiller, to rumble or gurgle. (In this context, a ‘grotesque’ is a purely ornamental gargoyle that does not serve as a waterspout.) Gargoyles originated in Rouen according to French folklore, as Casey Cep explains in a New Yorker article:
In the middle of the seventh century, the story goes, a water-spewing dragon was terrorizing that city, flooding its fields and eating its virgins—but when a priest (and soon-to-be saint) named Romanus approached it with a crucifix, the creature surrendered. Romanus burned the dragon at the stake, and, although the dragon’s body turned to ash, its head, apparently made of some kind of demonic or dragonic Kevlar, would not catch fire. So Romanus erected what was left of the beast outside his church, where, eventually, rain started to pour through it.
I myself can never visit an old gothic cathedral without gazing up at their scowling or screaming faces, which to me embody medieval and early modern Europe’s tendency to mix superstitious horror and (often lowbrow) humor, as seen in the open bodily functions of Dante and Bosch’s devils. “Were the monster-heads, gargoyles, and grimacing faces on medieval churches just amusing decorations?” Simpson and Roud ask in A Dictionary of English Folklore. “Or were they aggressive guardians, keeping demons away?”
I could continue this survey of guardian animals/mythical creatures for much longer. Indeed, pairs of apotropaic statues even appear in the Pokémon games themselves, guarding the entrance to every single Pokémon gym. Actual Pokémon, of course, have tremendous advantages over these statues and their real-life counterparts, serving as a moving, constant guardian and companion for their trainers. Does Pokémon owe some of its immense, international success to its resurfacing of the same old, semi-conscious instinct that made sculptors across the world carve gargoyles, gorgons, lamassu and shishi to protect them from supernatural threats? In the games they protect the player character from ghosts, dream-eating tapirs, sea monsters and flame-spewing dragons, to name just a few.
III.
Venusaur was originally called “Fushigibana” (“strange flower”) in Japanese and is “Florizarre” in French and “Bisaflor” in German, both of which combine forms of “flower” and “bizarre.” Its English name probably references the Venus flytrap instead of the Roman love goddess. While the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), a native of North America, does not figure into Asian or European folklore, it has made quite a few appearances in pop culture, such as Piranha Plants in Super Mario Bros. and Audrey in both versions of Little Shop of Horrors. (My research to this post lead me to discovery the wonderfully specific Carnivorous Plants Blog, which was unfortunately last updated in 2015.) Another carnivorous plant, the pitcher plant, inspired the Pokémon family of Bellsprout, Weepinbell and Victreebell; according to the Pokémon Yellow Pokédex, the former “ensnares tiny insects with its vines and devours them” while the latter digests its prey “in a day, bones and all.” Carnivorous plants probably owe these starring or at least supporting roles in pop culture to their uncanny, mythical creature-like combination of a plant with a predatory animal’s diet.
I have two related final thoughts about Venusaur. First, what started as a cute little Bulbasaur has become a true monster, with its original resemblance to a toad replaced by a true weightiness, an overall appearance best described as prehistoric. (Mitsuhiro Arita’s trading card illustration at the beginning of this post reminds me of the now-obsolete illustrations of fat, sluggish, cold-blooded dinosaurs in books I read as a child.)
Second, Venusaur represents the culmination of the symbiotic process that began with the “strange seed” placed on a newborn Bulbasaur’s back. That seed has become a flower in full bloom, a symbol of growth and maturity too universal, too archetypal to be denigrated as a cliche. If Bulbasaur was a rambunctious young animal — Ash’s Bulbasaur joined him in search of adventure — then Venusaur behaves much more like a plant. According to the Pokémon Yellow Pokédex, for instance, “The flower on its back catches the sun's rays. The sunlight is then absorbed and used for energy.” The Pokémon Stadium Pokédex adds that “when it is catching the sun’s rays, it often remains quiet and still.” It is, in other words, becoming something like the still but watchful guardian of Ono’s manga.
Bibliography
Aldred, Cyril. Egyptian Art. 1980. Thames and Hudson, 1996.
Baird, Merrily. Symbols of Japan: Thematic Motifs in Art and Design. Rizzoli, 2001.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. Princeton University Press, 1973.
Cep, Casey. “The Endurance of Notre-Dame.” The New Yorker, April 12, 2020.
Grant, Michael and John Hazel. Who’s Who in Classical Mythology. 1973. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Hearn, Lafcadio. Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan: An Anthology of his Writings on the Country and Its People. Ed. Donald Richie. Tuttle, 1997.
Ono, Toshihiro. Pokémon Graphic Novel, Volume 1: The Electric Tale Of Pikachu!. VIZ Media, 1999.
--. Pokémon Graphic Novel, Volume 2: Pikachu Shocks Back. VIZ Media, 1999.
--. Pokémon Graphic Novel, Volume 3: Electric Pikachu Boogaloo. VIZ Media, 2000.
--. Pokémon Graphic Novel, Volume 4: Surf's Up, Pikachu. VIZ Media, 1999.
Mercatante, Athony S. Who’s Who in Egyptian Mythology. 1978. MetroBooks, 2002.
Pedley, John Griffiths. Greek Art and Archaeology. 1992. Prentice Hall, 1997.
Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud. A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Zimmerman, J.E. Dictionary of Classical Mythology. 1964. Bantam Books, 1971.
I was surprised and intrigued to hear about that sci-fi x pokemon bit! I'm always curious about the ways in which tropes and genres recombine and evolve (as well as how lowbrow forms turn into proper “art”),
I thought it pertinent to mention that the Venusaur's flower reminds me of the huge and smelly flower Rafflesia. The Pokémon Vileplume is obviously based more directly on the flower, and still. Then again, it's also possible that the memory of Vileplume turned my mind to make the association.