`POKEMON' PHENOMENON CONTINUES ITS MARCH.

Byline: David Bloom Staff Writer

It didn't take long for Warner Bros. to follow up last fall's hugely popular ``Pokemon: The First Movie'' with another animated feature foray into the arcane mythology of the Pokemon world.

The bad news for parents is that Pokemon is still a powerful enough franchise (by a lot, it seems, from my informal survey of the neighborhood kids) that they'll have little choice about taking their preteen children to this film.

The good news, though, is that this is a much better film than the first one, with better animation, less pablum masking as dialogue and a engaging- enough storyline involving the usual suspects dealing with an overly enthusiastic collector of some of the ultimate Pokemon.

For those who've been hiding in a pop-cultural cone of silence for the past two years, Pokemon is a contraction for ``pocket monsters,'' which originally populated a series of hugely successful video games for the Nintendo Game Boy and N64 machines.

After several billion dollars, boatloads of merchandise and an equally successful trading card game, the newest film promises to further feed the frenzy with a first-week's giveaway of a rare Pokemon card and the introduction of dozens of new creatures to fire the collecting - and collective - frenzies of fans of the games.

In ``2000,'' Ash and his Pokemon trainer buddies get mixed up in the efforts of Lawrence III, a wealthy, wacked Pokemon collector whose airship (a highlight of the film's animation for its detail and imagination) is perfectly suited to capture three elemental Pokemon birds who represent the warring but balanced natural forces of fire, ice and lightning.

In temporarily capturing one, then another of the great beasts, Lawrence disrupts the planet's balance of forces and sets the birds fighting against each other and against another, greater, peacemaking Pokemon, Lugia.

Of course, only Ash, who happens to be in the area on something of a vacation at an island festival, can help put things to right. He also gets help from his friends and Pokemon, and even from his putative nemeses, the comic foils of Team Rocket (think the Harlem Globetrotters' Washington Generals, or closer to recent context, Rocky and Bullwinkle's Boris and Natasha).

The Rocket crew have a number of funny lines, and children in particular will enjoy the enhanced production values of this year's film, which nicely mixes traditional 2-D Japanese animation conventions with several excellent 3-D computer-generated pieces.

Parents will like a film with a positive message that is filled with action, but not blood, where even the losers merely get a conk in the head and later return to the fray or move on - wiser for their failures.

Even the short that proceeds the movie, ``Pokemon's Vacation Rescue,'' is more comprehensible and adult-accessible than its hallucinogenic 1999 predecessor, ``Pikachu's Vacation.'' As with the 1999 short, there is virtually no dialogue involving speech you recognize.

The short and the feature debut six of the 90 new Pokemon types that will be featured in upcoming versions of the games. Needless to say, your children (if they're younger than about 14 or so) will want to catch them all.

The facts

--The film: ``Pokemon the Movie 2000'' with the short, ``Pikachu's Rescue Adventure'' (G; moderate animated violence between creatures).

--The stars: Veronica Taylor, Rachael Ellis, Eric Stuart, Addie Blaustein, Ted Lewis and Ikue Otani.

--Behind the scenes: Directed by Kunihiko Yuyama (Japanese version) and Michael Haigney (American version). Produced by Norman J. Grossfeld. Adapted by Grossfeld and Haigney. Screenplay by Takeshi Shudo. Music by Ralph Schukett and John Loeffler.

--Running time: One hour, 20 minutes; the short is 22 minutes.

--Playing: Citywide.

--Our rating: Two and one half stars.

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Pikachu, Ash, Squirtle and Balbasaur are in action in the sequel ``Pokemon the Movie 2000.''