Movie Review: One Piece Strong World

One Piece Film: Strong World [2009]

So I guess I'll try doing a bit more movie reviews? We'll see. I rewatched Strong World recently, so I kind of want to talk about it. One Piece: Strong World is the -googles- tenth feature film for the manga/anime juggernaut that is One Piece, and it was famous back at the time of its release because the story was penned by the writer, Eiichiro Oda himself, and not by a bunch of unrelated writers. Anime movies created before the likes of One Piece: Strong World and Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods tend to have huge problems being slotted into the actual anime itself -- if it's not a continuity problem, then it's the throwaway plot. 

And while in a way the plot of One Piece: Strong World is pretty throwaway and self-contained too, it actually feels like you're watching a brief detour in the One Piece storyline since literally all the character designs (note how the giant land octopus would be reused as the exact same model for Surume, the kraken from the Fishman Island arc written after this movie) and a huge part of the script was done by the main writer himself. The storyline of Strong World takes place after the Thriller Bark arc, and would feature Shiki the Golden Lion, a character that, in the manga, was briefly mentioned during conversations about Impel Down. 

And, well, the storyline is... okay. Shiki basically brings the group to his weird base of floating islands, because he's planning to attack East Blue. In-between all this, Shiki is impressed with Nami's navigation skills and kidnaps her, and it's up to the Straw Hats to infiltrate Shiki's castle and rescue Nami, all the while dealing with the super-powerful wildlife that is reverse-engineered by Shiki's resident mad scientist, Dr. Indigo. The plotline is simple, and we actually get chunks of screentime that's obvious padding -- including a painfully obvious sequence of showing nothing but Nami slowly swimming in a pool in a swimsuit, before Shiki, Indigo and their pet gorilla Scarlet show up and do a weird protracted dance number. That was insanely weird and adds nothing to the plot, and if noting else makes Shiki look a bit too much like a moron. 

Of course, if the movie wasn't groundbreaking in storytelling, it certainly was in animation. It probably pales compared to newer anime movies, especially the new Film: Gold that was released earlier this year, but the fight scenes look cool enough, and even scenes of characters talking to each other is rendered in relatively well-done detail. I'm a big fan of the scene when the Straw Hats crew show up dressed in all black like gangsters and just start shooting up Shiki's operation with gigantic bazookas, Luffy walking towards Shiki like a boss, while Zoro and Sanji easily beat back Shiki's strongest lieutenants to let the captains fight. 

Strong World was also my first experience of hearing the Japanese voice cast, and god damn, the cast is definitely amazing. I had the relative fortune to watch the movie relatively early on as I was reading through One Piece the first time (it would be around when we're about to enter Punk Hazard, I think?) and giving these characters very distinctive voices -- Brook and Franky in particular -- has done wonders for my reading experience. 

The action scenes and general joking around (including Franky's weird crawfish motorbike) were fun to watch, but I didn't feel that I got the hype that surrounded the movie. Maybe the ones that preceded Strong World were just that bad? It's a pretty movie, but it's pretty average. We get our movie-exclusive supporting character in Billy the lightning duck (biri is the onomatopoeia for electrical sounds in Japanese, haha puns), who's... not likable, but not offensive either.

The main characters don't actually get to do much, with Nami, the character who gets the most screentime, spending most of it attempting to outwit Shiki without actually doing so. She doesn't actually get to fight and while she's not entirely a damsel-in-distress, it does sure as hell feel like it. Shiki himself is... okay. He's a hammy villain, he's got a bland but inoffensive plot of trying to invade East Blue, can control gravity and bizarrely this allows him to create CGI dirt lions, but the most interesting thing about Shiki is his backstory -- a man who's basically Gol D. Roger's contemporary, who cut off his legs and replaced them with swords, and has a boat's steering wheel in his head -- sadly, though, the movie doesn't actually do much with Shiki beyond making him a generic hammy villain who gets taken out by Luffy's Thor Hammer (which would also find its way into the manga). 

It's enjoyable enough fluff that ran for two hours without being too boring, some cool action bits, but while fun, ultimately an average movie in my books that perhaps gets too much hype due to its status as the first Oda-penned movie.