Working on the Pokémon anime ‘often doesn’t feel real’: Edmonton composer

Composer Geoff Li has worked on music for a variety of Pokemon projects, including the English dub of the latest TV series, Pokemon Horizons.

If you’ve seen a new episode of the English dub of the Pokémon anime in the last several years, you’ve likely heard the work of Edmonton composer and sound designer Geoff Li.

Li has been working with the company Madcap Labs as an associate composer, scoring episodes for a number of Pokémon projects, including Pokémon Horizons.

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Horizons is the new main series of the anime following the conclusion of Ash Ketchum’s 26-year journey in Pokémon Ultimate Journeys, which Li also worked on when he first joined Madcap Labs.

“They liked what I was doing and I worked well with the rest of the team and so we kept on going,” Li said.

He started out doing orchestration, taking a composer’s musical sketch, in this case for piano, and turning it into a score for an orchestra, assigning the instruments and voices according to the sketch.

“Eventually, they decided that they liked my work enough and that I had enough training, then I could move on to composing the stuff myself and orchestrating my own work,” Li said.

The team Li works on does the scores for each of the episodes released in the dubbed version of the show. When it airs in Japan, on a weekly schedule, it has a different score.

Even though there are more than 100 episodes of Horizons so far, Li says it’s easy for the team to keep coming up with new music for the show.

‘Composers naturally get bored pretty easily," Li said. “We start out with the sound palette that we’ve decided on, for Horizons it’s mostly just orchestra and other acoustic instruments … I don’t like repeating myself, so every cue that I write, I’ll try to do something a little bit differently.

“Then, over time, we slowly add a new instrument here and there, a new sound here and there.”

Inspired by metal and video games

Li’s love for music developed at a young age. He learned to play the accordion as a child in China and then the guitar when his family moved to Calgary.

“My guitar teacher showed me Green Day … and it completely changed my life. I was learning to play every song on American Idiot," Li said. “Then friends in elementary school showing me these metal bands got me into Slipknot, and that opened up a whole other world as well.

“From there, music was going to be a huge part of my life, I knew.”

He also grew up with a love of video game soundtracks and dreamed of writing “memorable” scores for games as a kid. One of his favourites is the Jupiter Lighthouse theme from Golden Sun: The Lost Age.

His final push into the composing world came when he was at MacEwan University in the contemporary music program and realized he had stage fright.

Scoring the job

While Li was at MacEwan, he did a guitar solo transcription of Downside Up Solo by Allan Holdsworth, a British jazz and rock guitarist and posted it to YouTube.

Years later, as if spotted on Route 102 by a trainer, he was contacted by Ed Goldfarb, the president of Madcap Labs and the lead composer for the English Pokémon animated series.

“I got an email from Ed … saying, ‘Hey, I’m a huge fan of Allan Holdsworth. I like your transcription. You seem like you might have a brain for the kind of work that we do. Do you want to work for us?’” Li said.

“Obviously that wasn’t the only thing to it … as we got chatting, I think we both realized we were on the same wavelength for a lot of different tastes in music - I’d written an electro acoustic piece for a friend’s graduation recital several years ago and I think Ed used to teach electro acoustic music history.”

Pokémon is one of the longest-running anime series in the world, having begun broadcasting in Japan in 1997 with more than 1,300 episodes to date.

Because of the show’s prestige, Li actually thought the initial email from Goldfarb was a scam at first.

“It often doesn’t feel real that this TV series I watched as a kid now has a score composed by me, partially.”

That sense of disbelief and awe he occasionally still has is about the same reaction he gets when he tells people he works on the Pokémon series.

Composing the future

In addition to the Pokémon anime and a number of other projects with the Pokémon Company International, Li is fulfilling his childhood dream of working on music and sound design for video games.

In 2018, he went to a Game Jam in Calgary, a 48-hour event where creators work together to make video games.

“During that time, I had written music for a couple of different groups at the event,” Li said. “It is the most fun I’ve ever had, writing music is so great.”

One of the groups later reached out to him because they wanted to make a new game over the pandemic.

“He said, ‘Hey, I remember you from three years ago. I think you’re the only person I know who does audio stuff. Do you do sound design?’ Of course, I didn’t, I definitely didn’t, but I said yes anyway, and I learned to do it,” Li said.

“Now we’re working on a second game together right now.”

The game they worked on in 2020 is called Element X and the one in development now, with no release date yet, is called Rogue Racer.

Other series that he would love to be able to work on in the future include Golden Sun, Metroid and Kirby.

All three series have different musical styles, with Golden Sun feeling like a series of epic concert pieces, Metroid as a series of eerie, atmospheric pieces and Kirby tending toward a whimsical style.

“(Metroid has) a completely different sound palette and way of writing for that as well, their music and their sound design inspires the way I make sounds," said Li. “That would be a very cool franchise to be a part of.”

Golden Sun hasn’t seen a new game in the franchise since Dark Dawn in 2010, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is scheduled for release in 2025 and Kirby and the Forgotten Land, the newest game in that franchise, released in 2022.

Li is also part of Game Audio YEG, a group that includes Edmonton-based developers and audio professionals passionate about making games.

Favourite pieces

Li’s work for Pokémon, as well as the work of other composers at Madcap Labs, was recently featured by Edmonton Symphony Orchestra (ESO) at the Anime in Concert show.

Part of the show, which also included music from Howl’s Moving Castle, Sailor Moon, and Cowboy Bebop, was the Pokémon Horizons suite, which include parts of three songs:

• Brand New Horizons! composed by Ed Goldfarb;
• Fury Dance composed by Li; and
• A Little About Terastal composed by Akhil Gopal.

When it came time to choose his favourite work from the songs he’s composed he said of the songs for Pokémon, it’s somewhat of a “revolving door,” but currently, it’s Fury Dance, which is a battle theme.

“Growing up on metal and video game music, (Fury Dance) feels like a lot of my core childhood influences mixed in with the sound palette that we’ve created for Horizons‚" Li said. “It’s shifting between all these different time signatures, it’s hard to predict.

“The melodies are inspired by a lot of the Pokémon main line of games (the Team Magma and Team Aqua leader themes) … it’s really heavy and it starts out with this low chugging piano," he added.

The texture of the piece, how the tempo, melody and harmony are combined, is also inspired by the work of John Estacio, the ESO’s first composer in residence.

“I’m just really proud of how that one turned out, and it seems to get reused again and again in the show, so I’m grateful for that.”

Outside of Pokémon, his favourite piece is one he’d written for a piano quintet, a piece made to be performed by a piano and four other instruments, in 2020 called A New Era of Immigrant Stories.

“It was the most ambitious thing I’ve done, perhaps overly ambitious,” said Li.

“I was looking into a bunch of different styles of Chinese and Korean music and learning about things that were related to my heritage. Every movement was based on a different style of music from those regions.”