Ye.
The first Pokemon movie made Ash and friends realize "why are we pitting our pokemons against each other? It is cruel".
But then Mewtwo made them all forgot everything.
Kinda good self-reflection of the franchise though, really.
It is essentially coq fights.
The second movie showed the main villain’s entire game plan was to “catch them all”, and that he was inspired to capture the Legendary Bird Trio because of a Mew trading card, so there was definitely some amazing self-reflection going on back then. Nowadays the Pokémon movies are just ads for the merch of that Pokémon, rather than an interesting story + merch ads.
Ye. I turned on some of the new series on Netflix for my 4 yo son. But, the new ones are way too violent.
And it is not just that they are too violent, they are violent in the wrong way. Like, glorifies it.
The old series were much more nuanced, with Ash failing upwards. And the fights more like wrestling than gladiator games.
I mean, they laid the groundwork 20 years ago if you look around for it. They made a huge emphasis (and still do to some extent) to show how Pokemon are intelligent beings and humanity is in a utopic state where they work alongside nature and pokemon to achieve goals. The anime emphasizes how a pokemon can defy a pokeball even after capture and can ignore a trainer's orders if inclined to. Pokemon have been shown to prefer or not prefer battling and have their own personal aspirations. some supplemental works detail how a pokeball is extremely comfortable and adapts to provide an environment that is suitable for each mon.
It's a razor-thin line but The Pokemon Company put a lot of advertising money into painting that clean image. Which is why it's survived years, decades of narrative against them, even from other million dollar corporations trying to argue animal abuse.