Let's get down to business: here we have a bunch of Pikachu — more than a handful, less than a dozen — "dancing" to Beyoncé's "Formation," that unapologetic celebration of blackness and post-coital feasts at Red Lobster. (I can't imagine where the Pikachu are keeping their hot sauce — purses and backpacks are just physically unrealistic for them, and they don't have kangaroo-style pouches — but their red cheeks suggest they've been partaking in some kind of spicy fare.)
The footage was pulled from a Pikachu festival held in Yokohama, Japan last year, and a YouTube commenter suggests they were originally dancing to Flo Rida and Robin Thicke's "I Don't Like It, I Love It." Christian Davis put two and two together and slapped "Formation" on top of the original dance sequence, and a piece of pure, sweet content was born. Let it wash over you like the tide lapping at the sandy shores of Cinnabar Island.
Two memes diverged on a website, and I took the one more retweeted
This strikes me as a neat inversion of last year's brief #BeyoncéAlwaysOnBeat craze. If you don't remember it, fans spent about a week taking clips of Beyoncé dancing and syncing them up with the weirdest and funniest soundtracks you can imagine. (This is a personal favorite, though this entire chain is great.) The syncs weren't always perfect, but the message was the same: no beat is too strange or too silly to be wrangled into submission by Beysus and her team of backup dancers.
I don't think the idea behind the "Formation" Pikachu is as interesting or as robust: "Formation" is great, Pikachu is cute, and that's about it. But it's interesting to think about the paths the clip could take if it reaches its viral potential. (Put another way: "two memes diverged on a website, and I took the one more retweeted.") Is the core of this video the use of "Formation," or is it the presence of the Pikachu? Does it lead to #PikachuAlwaysOnBeat or a series of other fictional creatures dancing to Beyoncé's latest single? I don't know the answer. The mechanisms that govern successful memery lie somewhere beyond the outer edge of my brain. But if you dug up a clip of the Squirtle Squad and had them shake their little shells to this song, I wouldn't be mad.