'Pokémon' skips airing an episode in the West where Ash does blackface

Pokémon kinda did a little bit of a blackface thing in a recent episode and Disney is not having it.

The 64th episode of the latest Pokémon Sun and Moon television series is not airing in the West, probably because the main character, Ash Ketchum, got his face painted black so he could blend in with a group of Pokémon whose faces are black. Polygon reported Tuesday that the episode already aired in Japan, but is not scheduled to air on its western network Disney XD.

According to a synopsis of the episode, Ash befriends some Passimian, which are kind of like beefy, lemur-looking Pokémon, and eventually tries to get even closer to them by acting like them and dressing like them with a Passimian costume and some black makeup on his face.

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The whole thing is done with the most innocent of intentions, but without the full context, the image of Ash's face covered in black makeup comes across as tasteless.

This isn't the first time an episode of the Pokémon anime aired in Japan but not in the West. A handful of episodes never made it out of Asia for similar reasons to the most recent episode, actually, because of the offensively designed character Jynx. The last time an episode was banned from airing in the West was in 2002.

Perhaps the latest episode will air at a later time with the face of Ash edited — after all, they changed the design of Jynx so that she was purple instead of black. We'll see.