Mr. Okamoto explains "During one of the pre-production meetings last year we talked with the director and then with the rest of the staff about how the previous short was both so experimental and so challenging and we ended up getting the sense that the staff was bit burned out from it. So we decided to give the shorts a break for a little while." It seems like the short movies require the staff to dig deep and really tap into their creative spirit! But even though the shorts are going on a break this doesn't mean that the staff won't have as much to look back on years from now.

Mr. Okamoto also explained how if they only have one longer feature film then "it's important to make that movie tight and have it move quickly from one scene to the next" in order to keep the attention of the small kids to whom this movie is mainly targeted. Of course there are also advantages to only having one film, such as the extra 20 minutes or so that get added to the runtime that allow them to pack in more drama and more pokemon.