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This scene has fascinated me ever since I was a kid. I mean, if you think about it, Meowth didn’t really learn “Humanspeak,” at least not the way we normally think about learning a language. He was already perfectly capable of understanding it (even if there were a couple words here and there he wasn’t familiar with, like “seashell” or “rocket”). And that seems to be a common thing across all Pokemon–just look at how baby Pokemon can start taking orders from their trainers from the moment they hatch.

So his problem wasn’t learning what the human words meant. It was learning how to pronounce them. And judging by the seasons changing outside the window during his learning-to-talk montage, it took him at least a year to say his first words. But once he does–once he makes it through that tongue twister for the first time–it’s like a switch is flipped and he instantly becomes fluent. In those last couple gifs you can already see him casually throwing around “huh” and “hey,” and by the next scene he’s stringing together sentences.

What does all this mean? Is pronunciation the only barrier keeping Pokemon from talking? Could any Pokemon do what Meowth did as long as they were as ridiculously stubborn hardworking as he was? Or are most Pokemon physically incapable of saying anything but their names? If so, what makes Meowth unique?

Brazil-based Illustrator Frederico Birchal has created a series of minimalistic posters featuring the costumes of popular movies and TV shows