One Piece - Heart of Gold
One Piece's newest movie, Film: Gold, has been advertised like crazy for the past... oh... twelve or so chapters. I'm not yet able to watch the movie proper yet, but someone gave me the link for the anime prequel tie-in thing, which was apparently made with movie-level animation? I dunno. I've only watched two other One Piece movies, the insertable-into-canon Strong World and the ambiguously-insertable-into-canon Film Z. Both were fun flicks, with Film Z offering some really great insights at the post-timeskip world that we haven't exactly seen in the manga. But let's talk about Heart of Gold.
It takes place in-between the Dressrosa and Zou arcs, which... honestly is a tight fit, considering the leap from Dressrosa to Zou is only like a week or two in-universe. But hey, whatever.
Heart of Gold honestly plays out like a very generic filler chapter or episode of manga, the type that Naruto or One Piece likes to churn out while the manga catches up to the anime. It's got a bunch of villains, a wacky supporting character of the week, a vague storyline that tries to be unique, and a sappy moral lesson at the end. In this case, we've got these 200-year-old immortals (well, stalled-aging) father and daughter, Olga and Acier, who's part of a missing civilization, Alchemi, and have access to a super-duper-awesome treasure, Pure Gold. Which is a gold that can grant immortality.
And it starts of semi-promising, with a member of the CP0 transporting the mysterious bratty little girl Olga, before the villains of the week, led by Mad Treasure and his (actually pretty damn cool) Chain Chain Fruit. But it kinda goes downhill after that, because everything that happens ends up being more or less generic. Olga befriends the Straw Hats, the villains catch up, they end up going into the wacky locale of the stomach of a gigantic anglerfish.
Mad Treasure captures the weaker Straw Hats (and apparently forces Nami and Robin into fetish belly dancer outfits) and enslaves them with slave collar chains, and the paranoid, self-serving Olga ends up going with Mad Treasure, but Luffy's gesture touches her so she ends up helping the Straw Hats in the end. Luffy, Zoro and Sanji engage the main commanders of the bad guys, there's a very generic "NAKAMAAAAA" speech that sounds like it came out of Fairy Tail... and... yeah. I'm not overly impressed with this one as a story.
As a tie-in it doesn't even really do it well, because as I got it all the movie ends up doing is to introduce the giant cat dude that's a subordinate of the main villain of the movie, and to give the Straw Hats the vivre card to go to the casino island.
I dunno. The fights were pretty as all hell, though, and two of the villains, Mad Treasure and Psycho P, are hamming it up like there's no tomorrow, so they're entertaining to watch. Their powers are pretty cool -- fighting with chains is always cool, and Psycho P's camouflage fruit actually is the kind of bizarre shit you'd expect from One Piece. Plus he raps in Japa-English which is awesome. Bomb Arrow Lady is... I dunno, did she even get a line? And the action scenes with the monster trio fighting the three main villains are gorgeous as all get-out, though Zoro and Sanji basically utterly one-shots their enemies. Zoro just doing his little speech about Buddhism values is awesome, and Sanji's utterly angry rant at having another pervert Devil Fruit taken away from him is hilarious. Chopper gets a short sequence of fighting in his Arm Point (is this an error? I dunno. I like the Arm Point) against some random dinosaur.
But other than that? Honestly I have no idea how this thing lasted one hour and forty minutes, because it certainly didn't have that much content to justify being stretched out that long. The story between Olga and Acier is stretched out for the sake of the mystery, Mad Treasure's connection with Nami ends up being one-note, and the World Government doesn't get to come to play. It is pretty, though, and I just rewatched Luffy fighting Mad Treasure one more time because it's nice to watch.
Hopefully the movie has a less blatantly-filler plot.
"It takes place in-between the Dressrosa and Zou arcs, which... honestly is a tight fit, considering the leap from Dressrosa to Zou is only like a week or two in-universe. But hey, whatever."
ReplyDeleteActually, that's impossible since Sanji and the others are with Luffy.
Good review, I did kind of like this special though, it was a little bit less generic and better animated (also, those stomachs were surprisingly beautiful) than the others specials.
Ah. That is... a good point. Yeah, damn, this doesn't make sense to fit into the canon of the manga, then. Mind you, not that I really care that much, but hey.
DeleteIt's beautiful, that's for sure -- the environments and the fight scenes look glorious. But the plotline was... m'eh. Mind you I am not well-versed in anime specials, and the only real things I've seen that are non-canonical compared to the manga are Bleach, Fairy Tail, Naruto and One Piece filler arcs... and this follows nearly exactly the same formula as those.