The studio that made “Wallace and Gromit” is building a Pokémon show out of clay, and as of Friday we finally know where it is going to live. “Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch’d and Pichu” lands on Disney+ as its exclusive streaming home in 2027, with Disney XD carrying it on television, and Aardman brought a new teaser and its production team to a panel at PokémonXP in San Francisco to prove the thing actually exists.
Let us be straight about what is and is not new here, because a lot of coverage this week has framed this as a fresh announcement and it is not. Aardman and The Pokémon Company revealed the collaboration back in December 2024. The title and a first look arrived at a Pokémon Presents in July 2025. A key visual and synopsis turned up at the Annecy animation festival in June. What Friday added is the part that actually matters to anyone trying to watch it: a confirmed platform, a confirmed year, the names of the people making it, and footage.
The studio that made “Wallace and Gromit” is building a Pokémon show out of clay.”
The series is set in Galar, the British-flavoured region introduced in Pokémon Sword and Shield, which is either an obvious choice or the whole reason this partnership happened depending on how cynical you are feeling. Aardman is a Bristol studio. Galar is a Pokémon region built out of Northern English industrial towns, football stadiums and rolling green nothing. Handing it to the people who made “Shaun the Sheep” is the single most sensible creative decision anybody has made about Pokémon in a decade.
Tom Parkinson directs, with Natalie McKay as creative director and James Young as creative lead. Parkinson’s description of the show’s lead is the clearest signal of what tone they are going for. He calls Sirfetch’d’s energy “wonderfully noble, slightly bumbling”, and says the character is “determined to be the best knight in the whole of Galar”. On the pairing with Pichu, he adds: “They really are best friends, and we think audiences are going to fall in love watching them stumble, succeed.” That is a Aardman logline. Nobody at that studio has ever made a hero who was good at things. That is not a criticism, it is the whole Aardman method. Wallace is an inventor whose inventions keep trying to kill him. The chickens in “Chicken Run” are catastrophically bad at escaping. Shaun the Sheep causes every problem he then has to solve. The studio has built four decades and a shelf of Academy Awards on a single principle: competence is boring, and a character who fails in an interesting way is worth ten who succeed on the first attempt.
The premise, per the material released so far, sends the pair on a quest to protect Pokémon across Galar, running into peril, alliances, rivalries and missions that rarely go the way they are supposed to. Phil Rynda, who runs original animation at The Pokémon Company, made the pitch in texture rather than plot: “Aardman has brought Galar to life in a way that makes you feel like you can smell the air, touch the tree bark, and want to adventure alongside our series heroes.” Which is a fair description of what stop motion does that nothing else does.
That is the real argument for this show. Pokémon on screen has been 2D animation for thirty years, and lately a lot of it has been competent and forgettable. Stop motion is the opposite of forgettable. It is slow, expensive, and every frame carries the fingerprints of a person who moved something a millimetre and took a photograph. Putting a franchise this enormous in the hands of a studio that works that way is a genuine gamble on craft over volume, and Disney paying for it is the surprising part. Surprising because Pokémon’s screen output has mostly lived somewhere else. The recent series and the last theatrical film reached international audiences through Netflix, so a Disney+ exclusive is a real shift in where this franchise expects to be found rather than a distribution footnote. Putting it on Disney XD as well says somebody is still thinking about linear television for kids, which in 2026 is either sentimental or shrewd.
What is still missing: no episode count, no runtime, no release date beyond 2027, and no cast announcement of any kind. For a stop motion series that wait is longer than it sounds, because the animation is built around the performance rather than recorded against it, and a puppet’s timing gets locked months before anybody outside the studio sees a frame. That last gap is more interesting than it sounds given the format, and we are going to resist repeating the claim circulating this week about how the show handles dialogue, because it has appeared in exactly one place and nobody involved has confirmed it. When Aardman says how these two talk, we will tell you.
The bigger picture is that Pokémon is suddenly moving on a lot of fronts at once. This panel ran on the Friday of the same San Francisco week that closed on Sunday with the announcement of a new theatrical anime film built around the trading card game. Two very different bets, two days apart, neither of them a trainer journey with a boy and a Pikachu. Whatever the company decided during its long quiet stretch, it does not appear to have been “more of the same”. Moving in two directions at once is either confidence or indecision, and nobody will know which until both of these actually arrive. What is not in doubt is that each one was handed to people with a strong and specific house style rather than assembled by committee, and for a property this valuable that is a genuinely unusual way to spend money.
What Do You Think? Is stop motion the right medium for Pokémon, or does clay lose the speed and spectacle the battles are built on? Does putting a Galar series in the hands of a Bristol studio feel like inspired casting or a novelty that wears off by episode three? And is Disney+ the right home for this, or should Pokémon be keeping its screen output somewhere it controls?
Catch up properly: every Pokémon series and film in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Pokémon timeline.
See you on the next binge!
