Movie Review: One Piece Film Gold

One Piece Film Gold

I have a confession to make: I'm not big into watching anime movies. I watched Spirited Away, sure, who hasn't? And I watched a couple of Pokemon and Digimon stuff as a kid. But I tend to shy away from watching anime movies, especially ones that are a tie-in to a concurrently-running anime. Because at the end of the day, these things tend to be like filler arcs in an anime. You get a villain, a plot, a bunch of movie-only filler allies, and the villain loses at the end. Moreso than just watching an anime or reading a book or watching a live-action movie, it really felt like the stakes don't matter, and all I'm hoping is that at least the villain looked cool. After all, they aren't allowed to change the status quo.Which is why the most enjoyable I've been when watching an anime movie was the Digimon Adventure Tri stuff, which was telling brand-new stuff that have lasting impacts on the next movie. Hell, even the newer Dragon Ball Z and Naruto movies ended up being so much better compared to their previous counterparts, in that the events that happened aren't exactly set in stone, so things might actually happen that change the chronologically future events, and not just 'hey, look at this filler episode, isn't it pretty?'

So bearing that in mind, I'm not going to be too hard on Film Gold. As far as these movies go, it follows the same identikit formula that a vast majority of other anime movies go. Our heroes go into this exotic location (a mega-casino golden city), meet a bunch of bizarre characters and quickly go through their powers in an opening fight to introdump them to any new viewers, establish the main villain, have some ham-fisted moral (here it's about how money isn't everything) shoehorned in, then have a final battle that takes up one-third of the city.

Oh, and even moreso than the other two newest One Piece movies that's spearheaded partly by manga author Eiichiro Oda, this one just throws canon out of the window. It explicitly takes place after the Dressrosa stuff, but the straw hat crew are all together, which didn't happen considering the crew was split up before they met up at Zou, and split up almost immediately afterwards.

Still, though, for a movie, it was a decent flick as far as these things go. The animation budget is pretty decent, shown most obviously in the huge extravagant shots of main villain Gild Tesoro and Nami's old-enemy-turned-ally Carina doing this huge musical number, following smoothly into a great panning shot of the gigantic casino-city, and then into the fast-paced action montage of the Straw Hats taking out a rival pirate crew.

The main character who gets the most focus here is Nami, and focuses more on her cat burglar days as she meets Carina, her rival from her old days. The crew are sucked into the fun gambling bits of Tesoro's town, but quickly fall into debt after some Devil-Fruit-assisted cheating, causing Tesoro to reveal that he's sprinkled gold dust onto every single person that comes, and if they can't pay up, he'll hold them hostage. And he holds Zoro hostage. Of course, there are huge, huge holes in the logic of Tesoro's business model, especially when we're shown that he apparently entertains the Tenryubito and even has CP-0 (well, one member -- Spandam, specifically, who I am pleased to see has a relatively huge role) dance around in his fingers.

There's a bit of a montage when our heroes try to make a heist to steal Tesoro's money, which I found to be the most entertaining and funniest part of the movie, but then it goes to Luffy and Franky meeting the most bland character ever, Raise... Raise something. That little man trapped underneath the sewers, and the rest of Tesoro's prisoners, and ham-fistedly talk about how money is power, and Luffy trying his darnadest to unleash the power of determination, and there the movie was the most flawed, with the conversations and dialogue not landing as well as I would've liked, certainly not as well as the Nami/Carina stuff (and even then the payoff to both the revelation to the conclusion of their backstory and the revelation that Nami and Carina have been tricking Tesoro all along).

The final battle is... okay. Tesoro creating a gigantic JoJo-Stand-esque golden avatar titan of himself and then empowering his minions (Luck Lady, Weird Dive-into-Things Cat and Masochistic Muscle Man), allowing our heroes to defeat them. Luffy defeats Gild Tesoro with Gear Fourth, which is cool since I never saw that form in animation before. But the rest of the battles kind of felt... perfunctory? Gild Tesoro was a threat, yes, but I never got that impression from any of the others.

Also compared to Film Z's more nuanced backstory for Zephyr, Gild Tesoro's backstory felt... oddly delivered. We see flashes here and there, and we see how he tragically lost his wife/girlfriend when he has no money to get her from the Tenryuubito, but we learn the full extent of the backstory too little, too late, and he acts so one-dimensionally mwa-ha-ha-evil in the present day anyway and thus it makes me really hard to care for him. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to read more to the fact that he's entertaining the World Government when they were the ones who took his wife away from him, because he's honestly not that interesting of a villain.

I suppose I have to acknowledge Sabo and Rob Lucci, who are hyped up in the promotion (and in the movie when they appear) but ends up being peripheral characters more than anything. And I think this is the first we've seen post-timeskip Rob Lucci's design in its entirety? It's definitely the first we've seen his leopard mode, anyway. Sabo briefly shows up with a gigantic Hiken to stop the marines from interfering, and Lucci hilariously gives no shits about the Tenryuubito as long as Gild Tesoro is taken down. The two fight and clash, but we don't even get to see that.

Overall, though, while it was enjoyable (hearing Brook and Franky's Japanese anime voices is always worth something, in any case) it's certainly not a movie I really consider to be super-amazing, and you won't lose any sleep if you skip this one. It's perfectly average, but doesn't really tell that interesting of a story or deliver any particularly super-duper-awesome battle scenes.