"I have fought and I have achieved my childhood dream. I built a mountain of gold the likes of which have never been seen before. But as I sit before it, the words a man once said to me come to my mind. Gold can't laugh, drink, or sing songs... it doesn't cry either, it might as well be a rock. Its true. Though I devoted my whole life to it... it wasn't the gold I was searching for. It was the adventure that came from looking for it."
Now that I have watched all the way through One Piece and have to wait now to see what the Elbaph arc is all about, I think I'm going to go back through all the supplemental material I skipped on that journey, specifically the manga spin-offs and early theatrical ventures I may have missed. So the first entry in that category is this one! I was always interested in this film as it is literally called One Piece: The Movie and is the originator of the format that would be iterated on like 15 times until we get to Film: RED, but I cracked into it for the first time today and really liked it!
It's so fascinating seeing Toei take on an original story in this series so early on and you can see that the combination of Hidenori Arai's sound design and Toei's own character design patterns caused the look and sound of this film to lean more Dragon Ball-esque than the main series, though not in an overt or distracting way. I may not have covered this much in my logs (as they weren't as detailed at the start) But I really love the tone and style in early Pre-Time Skip One Piece and this film captures such a joyful and silly era of the series that I fully welcome. Tonally it feels very authentic to One Piece in a way not all of these movies do in my opinion, and visually speaking, the production value is genuinely a step up from what the series looked like at the time/ would continue to look for years. More in line with the 1998 OVA by Production IG as it was shot on film and scanned in a way that has a lot of texture without sacrificing clarity, which is another aspect I really liked as that OVA is a favourite of mine.
I also enjoy the brevity employed, they struck a balance between telling the story in a thorough and fun enough manner while fitting it in this shorter time frame than future films effectively. I think I tend to enjoy when One Piece employs "less is more" style storylines with higher stylization so overall, this was a very lovely viewing experience!
"I have fought and I have achieved my childhood dream. I built a mountain of gold the likes of which have never been seen before. But as I sit before it, the words a man once said to me come to my mind. Gold can't laugh, drink, or sing songs... it doesn't cry either, it might as well be a rock. Its true. Though I devoted my whole life to it... it wasn't the gold I was searching for. It was the adventure that came from looking for it."
Now that I have watched all the way through One Piece and have to wait now to see what the Elbaph arc is all about, I think I'm going to go back through all the supplemental material I skipped on that journey, specifically the manga spin-offs and early theatrical ventures I may have missed. So the first entry in that category is this one! I was always interested in this film as it is literally called One Piece: The Movie and is the originator of the format that would be iterated on like 15 times until we get to Film: RED, but I cracked into it for the first time today and really liked it!
It's so fascinating seeing Toei take on an original story in this series so early on and you can see that the combination of Hidenori Arai's sound design and Toei's own character design patterns caused the look and sound of this film to lean more Dragon Ball-esque than the main series, though not in an overt or distracting way. I may not have covered this much in my logs (as they weren't as detailed at the start) But I really love the tone and style in early Pre-Time Skip One Piece and this film captures such a joyful and silly era of the series that I fully welcome. Tonally it feels very authentic to One Piece in a way not all of these movies do in my opinion, and visually speaking, the production value is genuinely a step up from what the series looked like at the time/ would continue to look for years. More in line with the 1998 OVA by Production IG as it was shot on film and scanned in a way that has a lot of texture without sacrificing clarity, which is another aspect I really liked as that OVA is a favourite of mine.
I also enjoy the brevity employed, they struck a balance between telling the story in a thorough and fun enough manner while fitting it in this shorter time frame than future films effectively. I think I tend to enjoy when One Piece employs "less is more" style storylines with higher stylization so overall, this was a very lovely viewing experience!
