One Piece Fan Letter

I hate that I'm a One Piece fan.

The big arcs, the big backstories, the characters. There's always something that destroys me with One Piece, and I thought this was just a simple little thing. A fun episode, with great animation, and a great little plot. Like a short-film about the world, but even this little thing can get me crying. 20 minutes, that's all it took.

We don't follow the original crew on this one, but the public perception on their biggest moment. Instead of a grand fight, or a grand moment, we just get people, and how from their simple, and outside outlook ... their lives changed. There's something about Luffy, a hotheaded kid, with an earnest desire to save the ones he loves against unsurmountable odds, which inspired a soldier, to save his brother. Something in Nami, a smart, non-powered human, changing the world with pure wit and tools, which inspires a little girl to change the world.

Each character has that little something, which echoes throughout the world. Their efforts aren't meaningless, their efforts change lives, and motivate those around them. It makes their story not only being important to us, but important for the world around them. They save lives, not only with the actions they take, but with those who look at such actions.

It's so fresh, seeing a positive chain reaction of pure hope. We always get the cycle of violence, the cycle of sadness, and despair. Not many times we get something so hopeful, that makes the world a better place by simply happening. It made me cry not from the tragedy of it all but from happiness. Not a good deal of anime cause that, and One Piece can certainly focus a lot more on the tragedy, but that's exactly what makes this so perfect.

So many tragedies, so much horror in that particular world. For once, we get the glimmer of hope. These people, small, or big, old or young, all of them can change the world, piece by piece, action by action.

Brilliant animation, brilliant characters, and an unmatched fast pacing that tells everything so fast, and so effectively. It was perfect. A perfect piece of One Piece.

10/10. We need more overwhelmingly happy moments like this.

The special begins on a recap of the Marineford War arc that moves too quickly. The sequence would be easier to process if it had been one continuous take moving horizontally. A later scene returns to the war at a slower pace but is blobby, not bloody. Outside of the level of consistency, nothing in the animation goes beyond what Masaaki Yuasa had done by 2014. After Ryuu Nakayama brought empathy to Chainsaw Man through nonstop naturalistic animation, and in the year where Midori Yoshizawa cut to a live action, all red POV shot of a mad dash down the street, it is hard to ... be impressed by the cutesy, endearing but not profound idiosyncrasies of one sweet Nami fangirl. Compositionally, the girl zooming through town on a vehicular bubble is a dynamic delight, while other shots seem literally flat. The art style itself is affectation for its own sake. It doesn't express anything about the One Piece world that Oda's art style has not already.

Ishitani indulges in the brilliant premise, but not enough. The depth of fandom is how celebrities appear liberated from the mundanities and cruelties of one's particular life. Easy references are insufficient to engage this deep, human subject. A rowdy bar argument about who may be the world's strongest swordsman seems too detached, as if we are watching from the vantage point of someone who does not share their excitement. A shopkeep in love with Brook's music sports deep black makeup under her eyes, a Goth touch implying an inner life that is otherwise unexplored. The protagonist's love of Nami, bluntly exposited as being predicated on Nami not having big muscles or a devil fruit, is not overpowering because Ishitani does not show us the suffocation of living in a world where only the strong are celebrated.

The special's best scene, which is moving as opposed to pleasant, depicts the violent backstory of a Marine in love with Straw Hat Luffy. The Marine's leg is shredded by a falling boat, a harrowing, tactile detail that makes up for the film's other depictions of war. Though it contains the film's best expression of the awe a distant role model can inspire, the heart of the flashback lies in the relationship between the Marine and his younger brother. A reverse chronological montage conveys the older brother's understandable irritation and the younger brother's heart melting sweetness. The rest of the sequence uses a star of light as a primal symbol for Love. The best images are all contained in these few minutes: blood gushing from a screaming mouth, an admiring yet bitter gaze at the back of a hero running ahead, a coward turning from what is obviously right.

The ending is saccharine, built around the lazy device of a vague speech set to music. The climax would be more affecting if the flurry of images shown were new, and not shots that were already shown earlier. The protagonist bravely chooses to focus on the moon instead of the finger, but the depth of that choice is under-emphasized. A post-credits sequence would have been unnecessary if the final scene had properly expressed the gravity of the situation. The film as is could use a beautiful epilogue, but the one we got expresses nothing that is not already in the story proper.

We can use all the auteurs we can get, and as few show-boats as possible. One Piece Fan Letter toes the line. Ishitani would do right to sacrifice the noticeable for the substantive.

No one is being gaslit into thinking this is what quality animation and direction looks like. Megumi Ishitani is perhaps one of the most overhyped directors in the industry and there's a reason you only hear her name from One Piece fans. Imagine if the entire medium used her philosophy in production. Anime wouldn't even be associated as aesthetic relative to other visual mediums like Western cartoons; it would NEVER be as popular as it is today.

You have MS Paint tier art with minimal numbers of frames being used sporadically while the storyboards try to imitate the likes of Ryogo Narita's works only for it ... to fall flat on its face and be a tryhard mess. The ugly audiovisuals coupled with the schizophrenic pacing makes this a nauseating experience to anyone who isn't a diehard for the series. Especially because there's nothing of substance in the actual writing itself (but perhaps that's a blessing in disguise)--Really all this is is just a poorly produced filler episode with lots of fanservice. The CGI on that ship looked horrendous as well.

I'm supposed to believe this is what episode of the year material looks like?