Detective Pikachu's biggest selling point was seeing Pokemon brought to life. This feat was performed by many talented animators and artists. One of the latter recently shared (via
Gamefragger) some of his aggressive, early designs for Charizard on social media.
The concept artist, by the name of RJ Palmer (
@arvalis), posted four pieces of his work, each of which feature an interesting, live-action redesign of the iconic Pokemon creature. Some of them couldn't be further from the source material, being more akin to your typical dragon, while some are even closer to the original than the one that we ultimately got in the film.
Palmer mentioned that the first of the pieces is the one that he made most recently, as well as praising the final design.
"Charizard was the very first thing I worked on and also one of the last. Charizard has always been one of my favorite designs. It was super cool to see what the finished effects for Charizard looked like. His animations were so good!"
Below you can see both Palmer's tweet as well as the attached pieces of concept art: