Movie Review: One Piece - The Movie

One Piece: The Movie [2000]

Yeah, a while back I was doing reviews for a stack of old anime movies that I've watched... and I completely forgot about this one. The very first movie for One Piece, released relatively early in its anime run -- hell, Sanji hasn't even joined the crew yet! Running for 50 minutes, "One Piece: The Movie" is basically your archetypal anime filler arc. There's a simple, bare-bones story; a standard villain that falls to one of the hero's 'finishers' from the canon story; an annoying guest star kiddy side-character and absolutely no bearing towards the main plot at all. 

And... and, well, that's clearly what they're doing here. And it's a bit mean to take this 2000-era movies and comparing it to the bigger-budget newer movies, where the manga/anime's creators tended to have far more input... but jeez, the age of this thing really shows. It's not just the animation -- sure, it is clunky now, but it stands up to the One Piece animation of the time -- but everything around it just feels like it's just quickly cobbled together and rushed to be shipped to the cinemas. 

The story is pretty simple, and stretched for 50 minutes without any real emotional weight. Our heroes (just Luffy, Zoro, Nami and Usopp) meet a random kid, Tobio, who is basically a copy of any crying kid in any anime movie ever, tangentially involved with the plot of the movie, which is the treasure of "Great Gold Pirate" Woonan. The kid's not particularly pleased with his grandfather Ganzo, who's obsessed with making oden (yeah, some Sanji vibes here) due to a past promise with Woonan, although we don't really learn this later. And Tobio's plenty annoying, I can tell you that.

There's the main antagonist, El Drago, who's... who's just an archetypal pirate. He has an okay design, but absolutely nothing that's super interesting. He's got the Scream Scream Fruit, that allows him to shoot lasers from his mouth? He wants the gold because gold is good, and he ends up causing general trouble until the third act, where he fights Luffy while his sword-wielding stooge fights Zoro.

And... and that's honestly everything I can say about the movie. It's utterly flat. The story's miniscule, the villain's flat, the side character's story is delivered pretty mechanical blandness... I didn't hate the movie, but I won't say I enjoyed my time either.