Gotta Watch ’Em All: Your Pokémon Marathon Starts on Tubi
Ten Pokémon movies and shows for Trainers who suddenly feel the urge to revisit Ash, Pikachu, and 30 years of Pokémon lore.
Pokémon fans, your weekend plans just got considerably more ambitious. The 2026 Pokémon World Championships in San Francisco are kicking off, bringing together Trainers competing across the Pokémon games while PokémonXP turns the weekend into an even bigger celebration of Pokémon's 30th anniversary and a franchise that's spent three decades asking us one extremely important question: what's your favorite Pokémon?
Naturally, all that battling has us feeling nostalgic. Maybe you remember Ash Ketchum oversleeping and getting stuck with the Pikachu who wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. Maybe Mewtwo was your first introduction to existential philosophy. Maybe you came in during Kalos, Alola, or somewhere in between. Either way, Tubi currently has enough Pokémon movies and TV shows to send you straight back into Trainer mode.
Your unofficial Pokémon World Championships watchlist is ready. Pick your starting point and press play. No badges required.
Pokémon the Series: The Beginning
Ash Ketchum's legendary Pokémon journey begins with him doing something incredibly heroic: oversleeping. By the time he reaches Professor Oak's lab, Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle have already been claimed, leaving him with one extremely unimpressed Pikachu. Pokémon the Series: The Beginning takes us back through Ash's Indigo League and Orange Islands adventures, when he was collecting his first badges, Misty wanted her bike replaced, and Team Rocket was perfecting the art of blasting off again.
Feeling a bit nostalgic watching Pokémon Worlds? There really isn't a better reset button than the beginning of Ash and Pikachu's journey. You get the Gym battles and original 151, sure, but the real draw is watching Ash and Pikachu go from “please get this electric mouse away from me” to one of animation's defining friendships.
Pokémon: The First Movie
Mewtwo wakes up, discovers humans created him from Mew's DNA, and immediately asks the kind of existential questions most of us weren't prepared to encounter in a Pokémon movie. Pokémon: The First Movie brings Ash and friends to Mewtwo's island, where the world's most powerful Pokémon has decided to settle the whole Mew vs. Mewtwo, original-versus-clone debate with a battle.
But the reason people still talk about this one isn't simply Mewtwo being incredibly cool, although, yes, Mewtwo is incredibly cool. The movie goes surprisingly hard on identity, purpose, and whether the circumstances of your creation determine who you become. Then Ash gets caught between Mew and Mewtwo, Pikachu starts crying, and suddenly an entire theater full of children is discovering emotional devastation.
Pokémon the Movie 2000
Pokémon the Movie 2000 apparently looked at the first movie and said, we can fit more Legendaries than that. When a collector disrupts the balance between the three Legendary birds, Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, and their master Lugia, Ash finds himself at the center of an ancient prophecy while Lugia attempts to keep an increasingly chaotic situation from becoming an actual apocalypse.
You're getting elemental battles, Legendary Pokémon lore, Lugia, and one of the franchise's most majestic Pokémon soaring straight into the action. Ash went out to become a Pokémon Master. Nobody mentioned the occasional responsibility for maintaining the planet's climate.
Pokémon the Series: XY
Ash arrives in Kalos and apparently decides we're taking battling seriously now. Pokémon the Series: XY brings in Serena, Clemont, and Bonnie, introduces Mega Evolution to the anime and eventually gives Ash one of the most formidable partners of his entire journey: Greninja.
If the Pokémon World Championships have you thinking about team composition, battle strategy, and which Pokémon you'd absolutely bring into a tournament, XY is where the anime scratches that competitive itch especially well. The Gym battles get bigger, Ash gets sharper, and the Ash-Greninja bond pushes things into territory that still inspires fandom debate.
Pokémon the Series: Black & White
Sometimes the best part of Pokémon is getting dropped into a region where suddenly you don't know what anything is again. Pokémon the Series: Black & White sends Ash and Pikachu into the Unova region, introducing Iris, Cilan, and an entire generation of Pokémon that gave fans a fresh Pokédex to obsess over.
That's the appeal of revisiting Pokémon Black & White; Unova gets to feel genuinely new. New rivals, new Gym Leaders, new Pokémon, and the familiar satisfaction of slowly learning which creatures you would absolutely put on your team. If Snivy, Oshawott, or Tepig was your starter generation, welcome home. Your Pokédex remembers you.
Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon
After years of Indigo. Johto. Unova. Kalos. Ash Ketchum finally becomes a Pokémon League Champion. Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon trades the usual Gym-to-Gym journey for the tropical Alola region, where Ash attends Pokémon School, tackles Island Challenges, and builds a wonderfully strange little found family of Pokémon and friends. The looser animation and comedy give the series a different personality, but eventually all roads lead to the Alola Pokémon League.
And longtime viewers know exactly why that matters. After watching Ash get close for literal decades, seeing Ash win the Alola League turned one fictional trophy into a genuine fandom event.
Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You!
You know the story. Ash oversleeps. Pikachu refuses the Poké Ball. Spearows attack. Ho-Oh flies overhead. Except Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You! takes that familiar beginning and asks what else might have happened if Ash followed the path toward Legendary Pokémon Ho-Oh. Instead of simply recreating the original series, the movie uses one of Pokémon's most recognizable moments as the doorway into an alternate version of Ash and Pikachu's first adventure.
Many, if not all, already know they'll become inseparable, which makes watching Pikachu initially look at Ash like “this is seriously my Trainer?” even better. The destination may change. The friendship is still the whole point.
Pokémon the Movie: The Power of Us
For once, Ash isn't the only person expected to solve absolutely everything. Pokémon the Movie: The Power of Us gathers strangers in Fula City for its annual Wind Festival, where each arrives with a very different relationship to Pokémon. When the celebration goes wrong, the story spreads the heroics across the ensemble rather than handing Ash another casual save-the-world assignment.
Pokémon has always been about the bond between Trainers and Pokémon, but The Power of Us widens that idea into an entire community figuring out how to help each other. Lugia may bring the wind. Everybody else still has to show up.
Pokémon the Movie: Hoopa and the Clash of Ages
Pokémon the Movie: Hoopa and the Clash of Ages gives Hoopa the ability to summon Pokémon through dimensional rings and then proceeds to use that premise with approximately zero restraint. Legendary and Mythical Pokémon start entering the battlefield like somebody unlocked the Pokédex and hit “select all.”
That's pretty much the selling point. You aren't coming here for a quiet afternoon in Pallet Town. You're coming to watch Pokémon lore collide at blockbuster scale while Hoopa's powers turn every new portal into the possibility of another enormous reveal. If your favorite part of Pokémon is yelling “WAIT, THEY GOT THAT ONE TOO?”, congratulations on finding your movie.
Pokémon the Movie: Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel
Volcanion does not like humans. Ash is a human. Then Pokémon the Movie: Volcanion and the Mechanical Marvel magically chains them together. Mythical Pokémon Volcanion's distrust means Ash can't simply deploy his usual “meet Pokémon → become friends → save the day” strategy. The two have to physically travel together while trying to rescue Magearna from the mechanical Azoth Kingdom, giving the movie a reluctant-buddy dynamic we don't get from every Pokémon adventure.
And Volcanion's grumpy resistance to Ash's relentless friendliness makes their eventual understanding feel earned. Ash Ketchum has befriended gods, dragons, and literal embodiments of space and time. Volcanion still makes him work for it.
