All Major Humans In The Original Pokemon Anime, Ranked

As the name suggests, Pokémon is about the huge selection of cute, fierce, and loyal pocket monsters we've come to love over the past 30+ years. There are over a thousand species and counting, and together they've driven the success of one of the biggest franchises on the planet in anime, trading cards, video games, and much more. But what about humans? While humans aren't the series' titular character, they play a huge role. From Ash and Brock to Lillie and Lana, humans are still central characters in the world of Pokémon, so we ranked all major humans featured in the original anime series for it's entire run. Updated on August 27, 2026, by Niall Walsh: We're revisiting this guide to double-check our rankings. As Pokémon continues to grow in popularity year-on-year, more and more people are discovering the original anime, and views on characters can change over time. 33 Sophocles Ash's journey to Alola came packed with the largest core cast of characters in any given era of the anime. Some fans praise this generation for bringing such a diverse group together and giving them all a measure of development. Sophocles is the gang's weak link, and ultimately the weakest link on this list. The Sun & Moon seasons were clearly pitched as an ensemble approach, but Sophocles never changes. He's tedious at best and downright frustrating otherwise. The writers may have intended to remind us, through Sophocles, that not everyone is an Ash-tier hero. Some fear the unknown. That's totally fair, but it could have been conveyed through someone far less irritating. 32 Cilan For the entirety of the Pokémon anime's first eras- Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh- Ash and Pikachu's male counterpart was Brock. His departure after all that time left an even bigger hole than Misty's did, and it was inevitable that any new male traveling companion would be compared to Brock. It was a tough hill to climb, and Cilan completely flunked it. Cilan's entire shtick is food. He's a great chef, you see, and hey, that's good. It comes in handy when the team is starving, to be sure. But that doesn't give Cilan a license to never shut up about it. Food puns are this kid's currency of choice, and he trades them relentlessly to the chagrin of pretty much every viewer who ever got through Best Wishes (the Black & White era) despite this dude's every effort to thwart their goal. 31 Max via: turndownyourlights.com Pokémon is a show primarily written for children, and most of its main characters are children. (We'll ignore the fact that Ash has totally been adventuring for over two decades, that 1,200 and more episodes have occurred while he's "ten" somehow, and that some of those episodes even account for several days on their own... OK, perhaps we aren't ignoring it after all.) Back on track, then. If these perpetual kids, Ash and his friends, are the stars, then the only way to write a kid who isn't bizarrely grown in mentality and oddly capable in matters of liberty is to create someone even younger than the rest. We can forgive Max, May's seven-year-old younger brother, for being immature. He is, after all, seven. And a more believable seven than his sister's ten. That doesn't mean we have to accept just how annoying this brat can get. It's a teaching episode, sure, a moment to learn from, but the highlight example of the sorts of things Max brings to the show during the Hoenn era is how he pilfers all of Ash's badges when Ash defeats Max's father. Refusing to accept his dad isn't some deity is just another Tuesday for this kid. Max never really progresses past this, even if the writers seem to insist otherwise. 30 Lana Lana is... fine. She's another member of Alola's schoolhouse squad, the smallest of the bunch and easily the biggest lover of the open seas. Most of the time, she's kind of a blank slate, a siphon for the plot so that other characters can handle the situation. The girl picks up the pace a little at seemingly random intervals, when she's momentarily revealed to be trolling her friends in conniving ways. That may sound bad, but it's pretty much the only thing about Lana we can routinely remember, let alone chuckle over. File this one under flat. 29 Clemont via: pokemon.wikia.com Cilan failed to replace Brock, and Clemont didn't pull it off, either. But compared to Cilan, who is replaced directly by this spunky, tech-obsessed Kalosian gym leader, Clemont is a breath of fresh air. It's important to reiterate that Clemont's only really that breath of fresh air relative to his predecessor. He's got a bit of Sophocles in him, which is never a compliment; Clemont's sudden bouts of fear and trepidation are rarely entertaining. The shtick with him building contraptions to assist the team, only for his inventions to inevitably falter, grew old a quarter of the way through the X & Y years. The best thing we can say for Clemont is that he's better than he might have been in other eras of the anime. X & Y gets pretty intense sometimes, forcing us to see the better side of this young inventor when it does. 28 Mallow It seems like Sun & Moon's oversized posse is dropping practically one after another. Perhaps they're just so much better together than when considered separately? Regardless, Mallow is another fairly ho-hum addition to the anime. It's kind of neat that Mallow balances her studies with helping out at her father's restaurant. There's a bit of intrigue over whether inheriting the family business is really what she wants from her future, but it's never quite resolved, because so few of Sun & Moon's cast venture wayward from their home turf at any point. 27 Matori Matori's a name you might not have heard of before, particularly if you quit watching the Pokémon anime after Hoenn. Introduced as a recurring threat during the Sinnoh era, Matori is a whip-smart and devious member of Team Rocket who is designed to instill the sort of fear in her foes that Jessie and James are just too bumbling and pure to achieve. That sounds great on paper, but in reality, Matori is a fairly mixed bag. Sometimes, she's great, with presence and cunning. Too often, she's outplayed by Ash and friends in the most absurd ways, even by Pokémon anime measures, to the point that her very brief moments of darkness are all but washed away. It's nice to see her factor into several eras, and it's good to have a "real" Team Rocket threat, but Matori is just not as smart as she ought to be. She's also far too infrequent to leave a lasting impression. 26 Bonnie Bonnie is Clemont's little sister. Like May's little brother, Max, she tags along with the team, raising a would-be trio to a quartet. Unlike Max, Bonnie has some semblance of sense to her. The recurring joke where she attempts to marry her older brother to female guest characters is always worth a chortle. The problem is that she has basically nothing noteworthy about her, from the beginning to the end of her tenure. It's fine to be fairly one-note, given her age and disposition, but, by default, it makes Bonnie kind of uninteresting. 25 Tracey When we mentioned earlier that Brock was Ash's traveling companion for four full back-to-back sagas, that was admittedly a bit of a misnomer. For the span of around 33 episodes, primarily during the original series' made-up Orange Islands arc, Brock was busy elsewhere and "Pokémon watcher" Tracey did the best he could to make up for that fact. He isn't around long enough to leave much of an impression either way, but Tracey does get a nifty write-out in the form of being permitted to begin working as an assistant to his idol, Professor Oak. This also lets him pop in every couple hundred episodes (truly, this is a long anime) to check in with Ash and the others. 24 Iris After Misty left at the end of Johto, May took over her role. After May, it was Dawn. And after Dawn, as Ash headed into Unova and the Best Wishes saga, it was this gal. Iris shakes things up after both May and Dawn, both of whom we'll cover a bit later in our list, have the goal of winning Pokémon contests. Unlike her predecessors, Iris is all about Pokémon battling, which could have led to a pretty special dynamic with Ash. Sadly, Best Wishes' overall lack of oomph works to her detriment, and we're left with someone who doesn't advance much beyond a few threadbare spotlight episodes. If anything, seeing a more mature Iris a handful of times in Pokémon Journeys has helped her more than much of her own era did.