A closer look
Before the age of skip-intro buttons, Japanese animators had to practically beg hyperactive children not to change the channel. The 'Who's That Pokémon?' segment is the ultimate evolution of the anime eyecatch—a visual bumper designed to bracket commercials. Instead of just showing a static logo, they turned the bumper into a high-stakes trivia game using character silhouettes. This semiotic trick effectively gamified the commercial break, trapping viewers' attention through the ads purely out of a desperate need to validate their monster knowledge.
