Warning: Spoilers for Pokémon: Aim to Be a Master, episode 10As the Pokémon anime under Ash Ketchum winds down, its action-oriented penultimate episode has finally given some fans the proof they've waited years for: that the Pokémon films are anime canon.
Some films, like Mewtwo Strikes Back, were already unambiguously canon, but debates have raged for years as to whether other films are canon to the series. Ever since Latias first appeared in Aim to Be a Master, fans wondered if this might be the same Latias from the fifth Pokémon movie, Pokémon Heroes: Latios & Latias. As it turns out, it's not--but the setting of the film, Alto Mare, does appear at the end of the episode, and Latios and Latias flying through it are spotted by the original Latias' illusory human form.
Connecting Back to Pokémon Heroes
The Latias which has been following Ash throughout the miniseries had many of the abilities that the Latias in the movie had, which initially sparked curiosity if it could be the same one. However, Latias does not recognize Ash, which it surely would if it ed the events of Pokémon Heroes. That doesn't mean this Latias is completely unrelated, though. At the end of Pokémon Heroes, the Latias from the film is seen flying alongside two young Latios, suggesting that it had children. While a Latias child wasn't shown in the film, Latias and Latios are almost always treated as sibling pairs, so it wouldn't be a huge surprise to find out that a Latias was also born. The fact that it didn't recognize Ash but did return to Alto Mare suggests that Latias and the Latios it needed help rescuing were children of the Latias from the film.
Aside from returning to the city, the girl that Ash met there, Bianca, is shown, absolutely confirming the location to be the same place. In the film, Latias used its abilities to create an illusion of Bianca through which it interacted with Ash, and that illusory Bianca is also shown here, watching the invisible Latios and Latias fly by overhead. While many had hoped that Ash might catch Latias or Latios (or both), letting them go free allowed the series to tie back to a movie that fans might otherwise have assumed was forgotten. Ash did, at least, get to command Latios in battle, helping it to defeat the Pokémon Hunter that had injured it and Latias back in the first episode of the miniseries.
While it may not have been exactly what some fans wanted, the episode does finally clear up a long-running fan debate about the canonicity of the films of the Pokémon franchise.
