The design of Alto Mare deserves note for being the most extensively detailed urban setting yet seen in the entire Pokémon series. As master thieves, Annie and Oakley seem to be a lot more efficient than Team Rocket and should be given more to do in future Pokémon entries. They're fashionable, if somewhat snobby, teen villainesses with eye-catching outfits and hairdos who get ample opportunity to wrap the audience (at least the older male part) around their little fingers before their ill-fated (and somewhat rushed) attempt to take over Alto Mare, an island city that hosts the annual Water Pokémon Festival (the draw for our heroes, Ash, Misty and Brock). Annie and Oakley are the new bad girls in town and they completely blow their colleagues, Team Rocket, out of the water (well, actually, INTO the water-a running gag throughout the film). Aside from Ash's faithful Pikachu, they get the most screen time of any Pokémon in the film. Shaped somewhat like dinosaurs and able to both fly at high speeds and swim underwater, they're colorful, graceful creatures, a brother-and-sister team who are thoroughly devoted to each other. The film does at least make its new Pokémon characters, Latios and Latias, a little more powerful and more layered than most Pokémon get the chance to be. Thanks to these elements, the film is still worth seeing but you may want to wait until the DVD release, when it will be accompanied by the Pikachu short that played with it when it ran in Japanese theaters last summer. This is especially disappointing because the film's first half offered a most exciting build-up involving two spectacular new Water Pokémon and two clever and attractive new villains. The big action climax never quite delivers and the great triumphal note the earlier films ended on never quite comes. This may be a relief to parents and Pokémon-haters everywhere, but it leaves Pokémon's target audience hungering for more. At 70 minutes (as timed at a press screening), POKÉMON HEROES is the shortest Pokémon movie yet.