Sugimori and Nishida don’t explain why the two-evolution requirement was dropped, but it’s pretty easy to imagine it was a result of Pikachu’s design being unbelievably adorable. Odds are when Nishida showed her design to the rest of the staff, the reaction from many was “looks like a mouse,” making the name “Pikachu” a perfect fit.īut wait, what about the stipulation that the character be able to evolve twice? Pikachu can only evolve once, into Raichu (though later games added in the diminutive Pichu as the lowest level of the evolutionary path). As a matter of fact, squirrels themselves aren’t nearly as common in Japan as they are in rural and suburban communities in America, and if you live in a Japanese city, you could easily go several years without seeing one, even in parks. So why did the character end up being called Pikachu instead of Pika-whatever-squirrels-say-in-Japanese? Probably because there’s no set onomatopoeia for a squirrel’s cry in Japanese. So she turned to the animal kingdom for inspiration, and took design cues from…a squirrel!
#Pika mouse free
The only specific guidelines Nishida was given were that the character should be cute, use electricity-based powers, and be able to evolve twice.Īside from those criteria, Nishida was free to do whatever she wanted in terms of design.
e Pika (NA) American Pika Mouse Hare Rocky Mountains Pika Common Pika. Ken Sugimori, head of Pokémon video game developer Game Freak, and Atsuko Nishida, an illustrator who contributed monster designs for the series’ original Pokémon Red and Green installments in 1996, recently reminisced about Pikachu’s origin. Ochotona koslowi 354 4596 d 4597 4598 4599 d 4600 e Ili Pika d Ili-Pika. It’s the perfect name for a character that’s essentially an “electric mouse,” right?Įxcept, it turns out that Pikachu’s visual design wasn’t based on a mouse at all. As a matter of fact, the franchise mascot is so famous that even most non-Japanese speaking fans know that his name comes from a pair of Japanese onomatopoeias: pika, referring to a flash of light, and chu, the squeaking sound mice make. Slowpoke? Over here he’s “Yadon,” a syllabic jumbling of doya, which refers to a sort of blissful cluelessness.īut Pikachu’s name is the same around the world. For example, the Pocket Monster called Magikarp in English versions of the game/anime? In Japan, he’s “Koiking,” since he’s essentially a koi (“carp”) with a crown-shaped fin on his back. Perhaps my strangest experience with learning Japanese has been having to remember two sets of names for Pokémon species.
Pikas are one of the first mammals to be threatened by global climate change as the temperatures rise most cold climate animals will move north, but the pika cannot due to its fragmented habitat in mountain ranges.Original designer reveals that the real inspiration for the “electric mouse” was a different animal altogether. Pikas have keen senses to detect predators such as weasels, coyotes, or raptors that like to pick up a pika for lunch. After three to four weeks the young are weaned and are literally kicked out of their mothers home to find their own territory. Female pikas have two litters a year ranging from two to four offspring each time. Lifecycle & Threatsĭuring mating season pikas become more friendly with each other. Each pika has a burrow independent of each other and defends their territory aggressively. To survive the long cold winter, pikas collect many plants in the summer in their rock pile homes which they eat after the first snow has fallen. These furry creatures eat any vegetation available to them in their alpine home, even at times toxic ones. They range from California in the south to south-central B.C. Pikas are found in mid- to high-elevation areas in large rock piles at the base of open cliffs. They are about 15 to 23 centimetres in length and weigh 120 to 350 grams. They have short, round ears and short limbs. Small, brown, and fuzzy, pikas are a relative of the rabbit.
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