Rowlet Is Incredibly Adorable in the Pokemon Sun and Moon Anime

11/25/2016 01:13 pm EST

While Americans were filling their faces with turkey on Thanksgiving, Japan's TV Tokyo aired two more episodes of the new Pokemon Sun and Moon anime, one of which featured Ash catching his first Alolan Pokemon, Rowlet. While WWG reported that Ash would get a Rowlet earlier this month, we didn't realize just how adorable Rowlet would translate to animation.

Ash first encountered his future Pokemon when it was trying to gather food for a flock of Pikipek that served as its surrogate family. In a flashback, we saw that Rowlet was born into the Pikipek nest, although not all of its brothers and sisters welcomed it with open arms. Here's a gif of Rowlet as a baby, which will surely melt your heart.

Unlike the Pikipek, Rowlet wasn't built for flying long distances nor was it very good at spotting the difference between fruit and other brightly colored objects, so it struggled to gather food for the nest like the other Pikipek. Rowlet attacked Mallow's Bounsweet (mistaking it for a berry) and got stuck in electric wires, which forced Ash to rescue it.

Although Ash and Rowlet quickly made a connection, Rowlet returned to the Pikipek nest just in time to help stop Team Rocket from capturing the Toucannon that served as the nest's leader and stealing the nest's berry supplies. With Team Rocket defeated and with Toucannon's blessing, Rowlet decided to join Ash and quickly found a new home inside Ash's bag.

We scoured the Internet for some of Rowlet's finest moments in yesterday's episode and included them in a photo gallery below for Pokemon fans to enjoy. The episode will air in the United States on Disney XD sometime in early 2017.

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