Anime and the passage of time

[AKA Pokemon Fan]

A lot of people have through the years made many remarks about the Pokemon characters and how they have barely aged or changed externally in any way since the series began. However I want to provide an alternate perspective on this. First of all let's look at another anime that had many episodes, Sailor Moon.

SM consisted of two hundred episodes and three movies (plus several specials). During this time they faced six different sets of villains, died and were resurrected twice, and saved the Earth, their glaxy, and in the final season the universe from being taken over, destroyed, or reduced to nothingness. During all this a mere two years passed in their reality.

My point is that a lot can happen in a short amount of time from our perspective, with individual episodes being perhaps a day apart from the other in the character's reality. Thus the lack of aging of the characters might be able to be accounted for and reasoned by this timeline, giving what the series does say about how much time has passed.

The first season apparently lasted one year, plus two months (I think) until the Pokemon League. We are given no more info on the passage of time for quite a while but I think it's reasonable to speculate that the whole Orange Islands saga could have lasted only three months or less. Johto used far more filler episodes than the other leagues, thus the amount of time that passed may have been quite a bit less than what it seems to be. Its possible it lasted little more than a year. Then there is another confirmed word on time when someone tells Ash it will be X months (can't remember how many) until the Johto League Tournament starts.

And so if you want to be conservative its possible to see about three years having passed since Ash began his journey, enough to account for the limited change in the characters appearance's.

Then there's the fact that Ash and company could simply be naturally short. :)

Or maybe I'm just looking into this too much...

[The Rusted One]

Originally posted by AKA Pokemon Fan
A lot of people have through the years made many remarks about the Pokemon characters and how they have barely aged or changed externally in any way since the series began. However I want to provide an alternate perspective on this. First of all let's look at another anime that had many episodes, Sailor Moon.

SM consisted of two hundred episodes and three movies (plus several specials). During this time they faced six different sets of villains, died and were resurrected twice, and saved the Earth, their glaxy, and in the final season the universe from being taken over, destroyed, or reduced to nothingness. During all this a mere two years passed in their reality.

My point is that a lot can happen in a short amount of time from our perspective, with individual episodes being perhaps a day apart from the other in the character's reality. Thus the lack of aging of the characters might be able to be accounted for and reasoned by this timeline, giving what the series does say about how much time has passed.

The first season apparently lasted one year, plus two months (I think) until the Pokemon League. We are given no more info on the passage of time for quite a while but I think it's reasonable to speculate that the whole Orange Islands saga could have lasted only three months or less. Johto used far more filler episodes than the other leagues, thus the amount of time that passed may have been quite a bit less than what it seems to be. Its possible it lasted little more than a year. Then there is another confirmed word on time when someone tells Ash it will be X months (can't remember how many) until the Johto League Tournament starts.

And so if you want to be conservative its possible to see about three years having passed since Ash began his journey, enough to account for the limited change in the characters appearance's.

Then there's the fact that Ash and company could simply be naturally short. :)

Or maybe I'm just looking into this too much...

I would say less than three years; perhaps two and a half (which is NOT splitting hairs, because six months is a long time) - which would make Ash's apparent lack of pubescent development possible - he would still be 12 and a half, rather than 13 or a little over. And come on, 12 is about the greatest age at which a boy's voice can still be that of a boy rather than deepening.
There wouldn't be so much of a height change, but his voice would at least be deeper.

[BenRG]

Despite the recent attempts by both Medianet in Japan and NoA on pokemon.com to suggest that there is no passage of real time in Pokémon (by calling the characters 'ageless'), this does not fit in with established continuity. The passage of time, including aging characters, is definately established in the show.

Season 1 - Gotta Catch 'Em All
In the first episode, "Pokémon - I Choose You!", the narrator tells us that Ash is ten years old. This is bad for the 'ageless' argument, as they usually don't specify the ages of the characters when they want them ageless.

Later, in "Battle of the Badge", Ash tells Brock and Misty that he can't believe that it has been a year since he was last in Viridian City. That means that, to that point in Season 1, a year had passed, making Ash 11 years old.

Season 2a - The Pokémon League
There is no real mention of time passing during this season. However, I would suspect that the entire League Games can't have lasted more than 3 months from beginning to end.

Season 2b - The Orange Islands
This is the shortest season to date. I suspect, like akaPF, that this entire period was less than six months in Ash & Company's lives

Season 3 - Johto League Journeys
Surprisingly little actually happened in this episode, with an entire season taken up with just the first two gyms of the new Johto League. It is reasonable to assume that this was another 6 months or less.

Another reason for saying this is the events at the beginning of the next season.

Season 4 - Johto League Champions
This season began with the group's arrival in Goldenrod City. Among the events during their stay in Goldenrod was those recorded in the third Pikachu Short Movie, 'Pikachu and Pichu'. In that, Ash says that it is the anniversary of his first meeting with Pikachu. We now know that Ash is at least 12 years old at this point.

Depending on the time spent in the Orange Islands and the actual elapsed time in Season 3, he could be as old as 13.

Pokémon the Movie 4 - Pokémon4Ever
During this movie, we learn that Professor Oak is exactly 40 years younger than Ash and that his starter was a Charmander. Could that make the Professor the animé equivalent of 'Red'? ;)

Season 5 - Master Quest
Ash travels over long distances in this season, suggesting a lot of elapsed time. As Ash's birthday fell before the beginning of Season 4, It is reasonable to assume that his next birthday came and went during this season.

Season 6 - Advance Generation
At the beginning of this season, Ash is at least 13 years old.

Well, that is my idea anyway. :)

[RedStarWarrior]

Well....if you look at actual time...each episode is only thirty minutes long. There are 525,600 minutes in a year and the two hundred SM episodes only add up to 6,000 minutes....add the movies and specials and you still won't have a year. Even if you count each episode as a day or even two days, you won't have that long a passage of time. Face it, our time is different from theirs, not technically different in temporal wavelength...but rather in the physical applications of it. Oh...NM!

[The Rusted One]

Originally posted by Modern Casualty
Well....if you look at actual time...each episode is only thirty minutes long. There are 525,600 minutes in a year and the two hundred SM episodes only add up to 6,000 minutes....add the movies and specials and you still won't have a year. Even if you count each episode as a day or even two days, you won't have that long a passage of time. Face it, our time is different from theirs, not technically different in temporal wavelength...but rather in the physical applications of it. Oh...NM!

That got me laughing, lol.

But not EVERY episode happens right after the other; there's lots of deadtime inbetween. This is shown in the episode where the narrator tells the audience that a year has passed since the advent of Ash upon his journey - it was "Battle of the Badge", if I remember correctly. Now, if their time was the same as ours in terms of an episode = a day, and each episode took place the day after the previous, then a full year, each day with an episode, would have had to have passed in reality. Hmmm, that wasn't the case.

[Gary Warrior]

it apears to me that Ashs voice actually got HIGHER as the series progressed, in the first ep his voice a considerable amount deeper ( and scratchyer) than in, say, any of the Season 2 eps. *gasp* Maybe hes getting younger!!! that would make everyones life considerably harder...

[The Rusted One]

Well, either Veronica Taylor hadn't quite perfected Ash's voice, or Ash is going through what I like to term, "reverse puberty". The former is more likely, but I'd like to see the latter in progress.

[Treble Clef Jigglypuff]

Xeno Lugia said that at the event he participated in (the one that mentioned that the 6th movie would be released this year), it was stated that the characters don't really age.

[The Rusted One]

I know, but does that mean that we're supposed to believe that all the things that happen to Ash have happened within one day?
I mean, when it gives the age of Ash as 10, and then at some stage in the series, during Battle of the Badge, they say, "a year has passed" - so he's 11. But he's still 10, because they don't age. Uh-huh. I wish they'd think these things through. What reason do they have to not have Ash ageing? Nothing. Well, aside from that they're lazy and stupid, that is.

[AKA Pokemon Fan]

I wonder if since they're calling the newest Japanese season "Advanced Generation" if they will start aging the characters slowly. I mean Haruka has just started training and she's taller than Ash!

The producers may want to make the main characters "ageless," but the rest of the characters aren't. We've often been shown a character in an episode and a flashback of the same character showing them much younger (like that surfing guy with the twenty+ year old Pikachu).

Then there are the flashbacks to the characters childhoods. In the Third Movie we see Ash in a photo a good five or so years younger, as well as a younger Delia, Molly's Father, and Professor Oak in another photo. We've also seen Jessie, James, Meowth (well he did look a bit younger in that flashback episode), and Misty as youngsters.

But the fact is with a series like this where they don't have great amounts of time pass between episodes it would be very difficult to have the characters age. It worked in Dragonball Z and other series because of some key episodes were seperated by months, a few years, even ten years while the greatest lenghts of time between any Pokemon episodes would be a week or two. With animation as "undetailed" as Pokemon it would be hard to show such slight changes over a length of time.

Even so I wouldn't mind if they changed the characters appearences fairly rapidly. An episode where Ash starts getting facial hair would be most amusing. :D

Hey, maybe there could be an episode where the group somehow ends up taking an aging potion (hey, Ash got turned into a Pikachu so its possible) or suffering from a messed up Pokemon ability also causing them to age. Perhaps a sick Celebi could encounter the group... Zapdos and Articuno made appearences in Johto episodes so maybe we'll see GS Pokemon in Advanced Generation episodes. Then when Ash and the other "de-age" they would end up staying looking slightly older than they started out with, thus making the normal aging less of a shock to viewers. Ah, the joy of endless speculation...

P.S Okay, I admit I sorta recycled a plotline ffrom the Oh! My Goddess! manga with that whole magical aging thing:)

[The Rusted One]

Originally posted by AKA Pokemon Fan
I wonder if since they're calling the newest Japanese season "Advanced Generation" if they will start aging the characters slowly. I mean Haruka has just started training and she's taller than Ash!

The producers may want to make the main characters "ageless," but the rest of the characters aren't. We've often been shown a character in an episode and a flashback of the same character showing them much younger (like that surfing guy with the twenty+ year old Pikachu).

Then there are the flashbacks to the characters childhoods. In the Third Movie we see Ash in a photo a good five or so years younger, as well as a younger Delia, Molly's Father, and Professor Oak in another photo. We've also seen Jessie, James, Meowth (well he did look a bit younger in that flashback episode), and Misty as youngsters.

But the fact is with a series like this where they don't have great amounts of time pass between episodes it would be very difficult to have the characters age. It worked in Dragonball Z and other series because of some key episodes were seperated by months, a few years, even ten years while the greatest lenghts of time between any Pokemon episodes would be a week or two. With animation as "undetailed" as Pokemon it would be hard to show such slight changes over a length of time.

Even so I wouldn't mind if they changed the characters appearences fairly rapidly. An episode where Ash starts getting facial hair would be most amusing. :D

Hey, maybe there could be an episode where the group somehow ends up taking an aging potion (hey, Ash got turned into a Pikachu so its possible) or suffering from a messed up Pokemon ability also causing them to age. Perhaps a sick Celebi could encounter the group... Zapdos and Articuno made appearences in Johto episodes so maybe we'll see GS Pokemon in Advanced Generation episodes. Then when Ash and the other "de-age" they would end up staying looking slightly older than they started out with, thus making the normal aging less of a shock to viewers. Ah, the joy of endless speculation...

P.S Okay, I admit I sorta recycled a plotline ffrom the Oh! My Goddess! manga with that whole magical aging thing:)

Mmmm, I could see how they could age the characters slowly - one thing would be height - Brock has always been short compared to the women he sets his sights on - they could show him, slightly taller in comparison each time, or maybe even every ten episodes or something. To do this they may have to have a gap of two weeks between episodes, but they do it all the time - or the year that passed between the advent of Ash upon his journey and Battle of the Badge could not accurately represent a year at all.
Ash could also go through a growth spurt and get to almost as tall as Brock, perhaps.
Now, as to Haruka - I think she'd be 12 already - she shows too much "development" or the average ten year old, and something tells me the animators aren't aiming to show characters that are unnaturally developed for their age.
Then could come Ash's voice change - perhaps they could dub a certain amount of episodes, then take a break, then dub some more and Veronica Taylor could deepen the voice a little until they end up having to give her the boot in favour of an actual guy to do Ash's voice.
I don't think it would be that hard to subtly change Ash's facial features without the audience noticing; then, we can be told about it in some form - maybe his mother could say next time they see each other, "wow, your face is so much older", or, if Misty ever comes back, she could say, "you lok so much older than I remember". A series of flashbacks showing differences could ensue, and that's how they could start the whole ageing thing off.

[Mew2Too]

I would like to remind everyone that voices do not change in anime over in Japan. In Dragonball Z, the same woman did Goku's voice for both the original Dragonball, Z, and GT. (Of course, you would expect that in GT, woudln't you?)

[The Rusted One]

Originally posted by Mew2Too
I would like to remind everyone that voices do not change in anime over in Japan. In Dragonball Z, the same woman did Goku's voice for both the original Dragonball, Z, and GT. (Of course, you would expect that in GT, woudln't you?)

Yeah, but this isn't just an issue concerning the U.S. version - all of what I have suggested, at least, would depend on Japan doing it too, and would call for it. I mean, how else would they change Ash's or Brock's heights if they weren't animated that way?
Also - so what if the same VA was used for Goku throughout? Did Goku's voice change as he grew up? Or was it that Goku as a kid had a man's voice - or that Goku as an adult has a little boy's voice?