Flygon Prince said:
The part where Charizard skims the wall while being chased by Ice Beam was awesome. This episode's animation was superb, imo.
The animation overall was quite horrible compared to the best Pokemon can offer. Charizard in particular was off-model in a number of scenes (appearing way too fat or with too short a tail). However the scene you mentioned was animated much better than most of the rest of the episode, if only the whole battle could have been that fast-paced and high-quality.
Faerie said:
First thing: Looks like I'm not the only one who though Rizaadon was going to use Blast Burn, hunh? I mean, it glowed RED. And Kootasu doesn't glow red when it uses Overheat, does it?
Actually it does, at times at least, but the animators like to focus on Torkoal's red shell areas glowing more than the body.
True, Blast Burn is a FR/LG move, but it IS Rizaadon's signature move. Of course, Satoshi HAD to make a honkin' huge deal of it because it's a cliffhanger thingamajigger yada yada yada, even though we've seen the move ten times before. Rizaadon's just special.

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Well it did look like Charizard's Overheat was a good deal more powerful than Toprkoal's, but let's not split hairs.
Overall, as nice as the Overheat was I agree with the majority that it would have made much more sense to use Blast Burn. The reason being it is so unique and they wanted to emphasize how strong Ash's Charizard had become. Unless of course they plan to have it return again some day for an even more epic battle and use Blast Burn then.
lordrock said:
Yeah but he is a legendary pokemon the only time i saw articuno beaten was in the second pokemon movie and it took 2 pokemon to take him down moltres and zapdos so what's up with that?
This was NOT the same Articuno. It has been long known with some degree of certainty that The Orange Islands Guardian Articuno (along with Lugia and the other Legendary Birds) is a special Articuno. Other Articuno are smaller and not as powerful.
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Really, the Charizard/Ash interaction was one of the best parts of this episode, them flying together in the beginning was great as it was the first time they've had the chance to fly together for fun instead of danger or necessity.