#001: Bulbasaur
Between Plant and Animal
Researchers are unsure whether to classify Bulbasaur as a plant or an animal.
Ash’s Pokédex, Pokémon anime episode 10, “Bulbasaur and the Hidden Village”
Bulbasaur, the very first Pokémon in the Pokédex and one of three potential starter Pokémon, is the obvious starting point for this series. Fortunately, it also provides a perfect introduction to not one but three themes that will run throughout future entries:
1. Pokémon as archetypal characters in a monomythical narrative.
2. Pokémon as hybrid creatures in the mythological tradition, combing aspects from two distinct categories of being.
3. Pokémon as embellished, mythologized versions of real animals, reflecting centuries of folklore accumulated around them.
This post will explore each of these themes in turn before ending with a look at Bulbasaur’s influence on future generations of Pokémon.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell introduces the archetype of the herald of adventure with a reading of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Frog King.” This story begins with a young princess dropping her favorite golden bauble into a spring, where a talking frog retrieves it. Campbell calls this frog “the nursery counterpart of the underworld serpent” and compares it to the Asian dragon; it is a chthonic presence, representing the hidden, the unknown. It announces and embodies the fantastical world outside of the protagonist’s everyday experience, like the talking white rabbit that leads Alice down the rabbit hole to Wonderland or R2-D2, whose message from Princess Leia precipitates Luke Skywalker’s first steps into a larger world.
Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle play this role in Pokémon, which begins in a quotidian place: the protagonist’s hometown of Pallet Town, so small that it has just three buildings in the Game Boy games. The town’s English and Japanese names1 speak to its neutral status, its function as an anteroom in the Pokémon world without the vivid color of later locations. The game begins with the protagonist waking up in his bedroom and the player’s first few potential actions are equally prosaic: talking to the protagonist’s mother, watching television, turning on the computer or chatting with neighbors. The three starting Pokémon bring a taste of the wider, stranger world to Pallet Town, just as the White Rabbit brings a piece of Wonderland to the English countryside.
This is illustrated in the Pokémon anime, where Ash has a poster of the three starting Pokémon on his bedroom wall and spends the night before embarking on his journey dreaming about choosing one of them as his first Pokémon.
Campbell reads the Frog King as a shrunken dragon; according to Pokémon designer Atsuko Nishida, Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle were created by shrinking down their more monstrous final forms.2 Pokémon co-creator and creature designer Ken Sugimori has cited influence from real-life pets such as turtles and lizards, which he emulated to make relatable Pokémon for young players.3 This helps the creatures serve as heralds of adventure for the player as well as for the in-universe protagonist. Their similarities to real pets make them welcoming in a way that more monstrous Pokémon would not be, while their elemental powers give a preview of the Pokémon world’s strange, supernaturally powerful inhabitants.
In addition to heralding adventure, Pokémon’s starting trio also embodies another archetype in the hero’s journey, the supernatural aid. Professor Oak, who gives the protagonist his first Pokémon, is of course a version of the mentor/magus archetype whose other faces include Merlin, Gandalf and Obi-Wan Kenobi. This “protective figure” represents the hero’s destiny, Campbell writes, and provides the hero with the necessary weapons, tools or talismans for his journey, like the unnamed old man in the original The Legend of Zelda (1986) who warns Link that “it’s dangerous to go alone!” and gives him a sword. Professor Oak, in a possible homage to Zelda, gives the player-character a similar warning when he attempts to leave the safety of Pallet Town – “Hey! Wait! Don’t go out! It’s unsafe! Wild Pokémon live in tall grass! You need your own Pokémon for your protection.”
Said Pokémon – the player’s choice of Bulbasaur, Charmander or Squirtle – is thus both the herald of adventure and an important tool on the adventure, this world’s version of the enchanted sword or magic shield. One example of Bulbasaur specifically playing this role comes from the longest running Pokémon manga, Hidenori Kusaka’s Pokémon Adventures. In the second chapter, the Ash analogue Red accidentally unleashes all of Professor Oak’s Pokémon and must recapture them. He tracks Oak’s Bulbasaur to Viridian City Gym, where a wild Machoke menaces both of them. The trainer and Pokémon form an instant bond, with Red leading the Bulbasaur to victory over their common enemy. Oak immediately senses Red’s potential as a Pokémon trainer and gives him both the Bulbasaur and a Pokédex, sending him out on his journey.
“Since a monster is no more than a combination of parts of real beings,” Jorge Luis Borges writes in the introduction to The Book of Imaginary Beings, “the possibilities of permutation border on the infinite.” Both plant and animal, Bulbasaur follows in the footsteps of countless hybrid mythical creatures, from the animal-headed gods of ancient Egypt to the Greek centaur and minotaur to the griffins and dragons of medieval bestiaries.4
The philosopher and film scholar Noël Carroll has greatly expanded on this idea in his work on horror cinema, most prominently by listing what he calls fusion monsters first in his taxonomy of monstrosity.5 These monsters “transgress categorical distinctions such as inside/outside, living/dead, insect/human, flesh/machine, and so on;” they threaten and fascinate by violating the normal paradigms we use to understand the world. For example, creatures like vampires, zombies and mummies evoke both fascinate and disgust because they are simultaneously living and dead, because they occupy a liminal space that does not and cannot exist in our world.
Bulbasaur exists on the borderline between plant and animal. “A strange seed was planted on its back at birth,” according to the very first Pokédex entry. “This plant sprouts and grows with this Pokémon,” creating a symbiotic plant-animal hybrid that belongs to a long and strange tradition of plant-animal hybrids.
I will cover a few of these creatures in relation to future Pokémon, such as the mandrake alongside its descendant Oddish and the tree yokai called the ninmenju or jinmenju, which bears human heads as fruit and clearly inspired Exeggcutor. Hybrids with no Pokémon equivalent include the “vegetable lambs” that, according to medieval travelers’ tales, grew on trees and provided cotton in distant lands. The 11th century Persian scholar and proto-Renaissance man al-Biruni wrote of a tree whose leaves become bees, while the well-traveled 14th century Italian friar Odoric of Pordenone described vegetable lambs growing inside melon-like fruits on trees.
Besides the mandrake, the most popular plant-animal hybrid in western folklore is probably the Green Man, once described by scholar Kathleen Basford as “probably the most common decorative motif of medieval sculpture.”6 Green Men appear in or on dozens of gothic cathedrals and churches across western Europe, as well as on the signs of more than sixty British pubs.
While various theories have traced the Green Man’s origins back to the Egyptian god Osiris (depicted with green skin in his role as king of the underworld), the green-clad, forest-dwelling Robin Hood, or the English Jack in the Green Mayday tradition, Basford connects it/him to ancient Roman sculpture. Figures known in English as foliate heads or male medusas appear in Bacchic contexts and may represent Bacchus himself – often shown with grapes and/or grape leaves in his long hair and beard – or the satyrs and wild men who formed his entourage.
The Green Man became an ambiguous figure in Christian Europe. On one hand, its plant-half enabled it to symbolize the natural world, renewal, and springtime. On the other hand, its Pagan origins gave it something of a demonic character, that of an intruder from the dark, dangerous forest, bringing thoughts of decay and death to parishioner’s minds. Basford notes that many Green Men appear to be in distress or even in severe pain; “sometimes the leaves appear parasitic, drawing their strength from the wretched heads which bear them.”
Bulbasaur, in contrast, represents a healthy, mutually beneficial symbiosis. (Some Pokémon do not; Paras and Parasect, almost the nightmare versions of the Bulbasaur family, are “a host-parasite pair in which the parasite has taken over the host body” according to the Red and Blue Pokédex.)
Pokédex entries on Bulbasaur and its evolved forms focus on the creature’s combination of an animal’s ability to move with a plant’s photosynthesis. According to the Yellow Pokédex, for instance, Bulbasaur’s bulb stores energy, which enables to it to go for days without eating. Unlike an ordinary, stationary plant, Venusaur “stays on the move” to ensure that its plant half always has enough sunlight.
Mitushiro Arita’s Base Set trading card illustrates this symbiosis. His Bulbasaur is surrounded by foliage on all sides, almost at one with the green, growing world around it. And, unlike the Green Man’s sometimes parasitic leaves, Bulbasaur and its bulb grow together, the animal side maturing into a weighty dinosaur-like creature with a low center of gravity as the plant side grows from a bulb into a blooming flower. This is, in other words, a positive, not repulsive, crossing of categorical boundaries.
#/media/File:BulbasaurBaseSet44.jpg){kind=link}
Bulbasaur, a plant-animal hybrid, is also a grass-poison hybrid according to Pokémon’s elemental type system. This type combination, along with the creature’s appearance, could simply reflect the influence of real-world poisonous amphibians, such as the cane toad or South America’s notorious poison dart frog. However, its poisonousness and magical powers also evoke — perhaps unconsciously — the wealth of folklore that accumulated around the common toad (Bufo bufo), especially in medieval and early modern England.
In his wonderfully titled essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” George Orwell observes that “the toad, unlike the skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from the poets.”7 A brief survey of England’s national poet bears this out. For Shakespeare, the toad is an evil omen, representing poison, general foulness, and witchcraft. In Richard III, Queen Margaret calls Richard a “poisonous bunch-backed toad;” Queen Elizabeth calls him a “foul bunch-backed toad;” future Queen Anne Neville insults him with “Never hung poison on a fouler toad. /Out of my sight! Thou dost infect my eyes.”
While we think of the black cat as the quintessential witch’s familiar, the toad often played this role in English folklore and indeed in Shakespeare. In Macbeth, one of the Weird Sisters has a toad as a familiar and “toe of frog” is the third ingredient of the witches’ brew. In The Tempest, Caliban calls upon toads, bats and beetles as he attempts to curse Prospero with his mother’s witchcraft.
Shakespeare also refers to the toad’s non-witchcraft magical powers. In As You Like It, Duke Senior reflects on the intertwined joys and challenges of life in the forest using a now-unfamiliar image:
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
This simile comes from an English old folk belief that a precious jewel — with magical powers — could spontaneously grow inside a toad’s head. Folk belief, in the words of the Dictionary of English Folklore, credited toadstones with the power to “detect and counteract poisons, heal bites and stings, and help women in childbirth.”8
The toadstone has a parallel in east Asian folklore. Chinese and Japanese artists almost always depict the Daoist immortal Liu Haichan alongside a magical three-legged toad who in some accounts has the ability to teleport. This creature, known in English as the “golden toad” or the “money toad” because it constantly runs away but is always lured back by a display of money, is a lunar symbol, with its three legs representing the three phases of the moon. According to one Chinese folk tradition, it produces a pearl with the power to restore a dead body to life or to make a living person immortal.9
The toadstone and the toad pearl probably originated in the same place: the fairly universal concept of like cures like, which dates back to the Hippocratic corpus, runs throughout magical thinking in various cultures, and lives on in the form of homeopathic medicine. If toads can poison people and animals, this line of thinking goes, then it’s only logical that they also provide a powerful antidote, that they can heal as well as poison.10
Is Bulbasaur’s strange seed a distant, probably unintentional echo of the toadstone or the toad pearl? It gives its toadlike host/symbiotic partner a plethora of powers: poisoning enemies, whipping them with vines, leeching their energy, shooting seeds like bullets, taking in sunlight and then firing the powerful Solar Beam. It grows alongside the creature, just like the toadstone. It can heal its host, restoring hit points via the grass-type attacks Leetch Seed and Synthesis. It has, in other words, a gamified ability to heal and even restore life.
In a 2024 survey of almost 3,000 r/pokemon users, Bulbasaur received the second-most votes for favorite Pokémon, trailing only Charizard, perhaps the most overtly archetypal Pokémon. This popularity reflects Bulbasaur’s prominent roles in Pokémon multimedia since the first games came out in 1996.
The original Red and Blue manual recommends it as a starter Pokémon for new trainers because its type advantage against the first two gym leaders makes the early game easier; Bulbasaur was thus the very first Pokémon seen and used by many players.
Ash’s Bulbasaur, which famously refuses to evolve, is his second-longest tenured Pokémon (after Pikachu, of course) and has appeared in dozens and dozens of anime episodes. Ash’s Pokémon Special analogue Red, as previously mentioned, has a Bulbasaur, which he nicknames “Saur,” as his starter Pokémon; unlike Ash, he raises Saur into an Ivysaur and then a Venusaur. Multiple Bulbasaur appear in POKÉMON Detective Pikachu (2019).
Outside of the Pokémon world, Bulbasaur is one of five Pokemon to appear on commemorative $1 coins minted by the island nation of Niue and is the namesake of the recently discovered late Permian dycinodont Bulbasaurus.11
However, Bulbasaur’s most important legacy – and the one that best speaks to its distillation of mythology – comes through its clear descendants in subsequent generations of Pokémon. In generations 2-9, starting Pokémon trios have followed the fire-water-grass, rock-paper-scissors pattern established by the first generation, with the grass starters taking after Bulbasaur’s combination of a plant and an archetypal, mythologized animal.
The Gold and Silver starter Chikorita, for instance, is a baby dinosaur with flower buds around its neck and a leaf growing out of the top of its head; like Venusaur, its final evolution Meganium combines an animal with a flower in full bloom. Turtwig is a plant-turtle hybrid whose final form resembles a combination of an ankylosaurus and a hillside; Snivy is a plant-snake hybrid; Rowlet is a plant-owl. Generation VIII starter Grookey evolves into Rillaboom, a creature whose combination of ape and jungle provides an almost hieroglyphic symbol of wild nature.
In the world of Pokémon, then, an adventure-heralding plant-animal hybrid seems to be a necessary monster.
Masara Town, a play on the Japanese words massara (brand new) and masshiro (pure white).
Nishida: “I created the designs for Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle by working backward from their final forms. I wanted people to be surprised when it evolved into Charizard, so I designed the original Charmander in such a way that Charizard would be unimaginable.” https://www.pokemon.com/us/pokemon-news/creator-profile-the-creators-of-pikachu
Ibid.
And beyond, to Lewis Carroll’s Mock Turtle, H.G. Wells’ beast-men, The Fly and too many others to mention.
Carrol, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror or, Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 1990.
Basford, Kathleen. The Green Man. D.S. Brewer, 1978.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/some-thoughts-on-the-common-toad/
Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud. A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Eberhard, Wolfram. The Local Cultures of South and East China. E.J. Brill, 1969.
The rest of the toad’s body also had value in English folk medicine. The whole toad, specific body parts or powdered toad were used to treat illnesses including whooping cough, the plague, and the king’s evil.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5289114/ Bulbasaurus is the species name; the genus name phylloxyron literally translates to “leaf razor” in a probable reference to the Bulbasaur family’s grass-type attack Razor Leaf.
The pagan origins of the Green Man are in serious doubt because the figure doesn't appear in the Dark Ages. Only in the High Middle Ages.
Loving this.