Detective Pikachu Reveals Horrifying Lickitung Secret

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu arguably spared no expense when it came to bringing the franchise's characters into a live-action film, with many fans praising the almost-photorealistic take on the animated creatures. As a new interview with io9 reveals, that went to some pretty specific extremes when it came to Lickitung, the memorable Pokemon who licks the face of Tim Goodman (Justice Smith) early on in the film. As Pete Dionne, a VFX Supervisor at MPC, revealed, the visual even put thought into what exactly Lickitung's massive tongue would actually feel like.

"It feels like a baby's tongue," Dionne explained. "Ultimately, what we ended up using was a giant, scaled-up baby's tongue, with the same very soft, but slightly coarse texture, with the slightest level of moisture. And trust me when I say a lot of discussion went into that."

"The first proposal was that [Lickitung] wouldn't even have any saliva. Saliva is too gross," Dionne continued. "It would just be a completely dry, soft silicone tongue, which, you know, wasn't going to work for the whole gag... So there was endless amounts of finding, 'In nature, what is the cutest version of a tongue?' and then finding reams of reference for that. That was kind of our design process, across the board."

So, if you've ever wondered what the texture of a Lickitung's tongue would be, you appear to have some sort of an answer.

While some might laugh at the amount of effort put into crafting Lickitung's most notable feature, it sounds like that was just one example of the film's approach to the world of Pokemon.

"At the core of all the Pokemon design, one thing that the Pokémon Company—who played a very active part in developing these with us—one thing that they were uncompromising on was 'all Pokemon, no matter what the circumstances, need to remain adorable.' That's kind of a core, fundamental principle," Dionne said of MPC's relationship with the minds behind Pokémon. "So that introduced a lot of really tricky problems across many characters in the film when we tried to translate them into real life, or tried to service them when putting them in scenarios where they maybe can't be completely adorable—or maybe we can't dimensionalize certain aspects in a way anyone would find adorable. They were uncompromising, and we would do iteration after iteration until we found a compromise."

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu is now out in theaters. The official synopsis for Pokemon: Detective Pikachu reads as such, "The story begins when ace detective Harry Goodman goes mysteriously missing, prompting his 21-year-old son Tim to find out what happened. Aiding in the investigation is Harry's former Pokémon partner, Detective Pikachu: a hilariously wise-cracking, adorable super-sleuth who is a puzzlement even to himself.