We're at the point in the Dressrosa arc where you pretty much have to be resigned to One Piece's excruciating pace and low production values in order to muster through. We continue with the one-on-one battle of Trafalgar Law and Donquixote Doflamingo, which has reached a phase of repetition that's really starting to challenge my patience watching it week to week. We get the usual shonen smack talk, an exchange of String-String and Op-Op powers, Law gets desperate and cocky, Doflamingo gets angry and then maniacally gleeful, etc. Thankfully, we seem to have reached the end of it due to an interesting development that I'll get to in a bit.
Continuing on from last week, it seems One Piece has temporarily bottomed out in its animation. Toei held on long enough to keep the Corazón flashback looking pretty nice, but now the toll has been taken. Throughout the episode we see the camera cutting away from the action just as the most interesting motions are in play, letting the sound effects tell the story more than anything. This has been used effectively in the past, but it feels so stiff and unnatural here, like the various shots are uncomfortably crammed together and desperate to make you look the other way just as things get to their ugliest.
Thankfully, this episode does have a bit more meat on it than the last. The way the modern One Piece anime normally operates is that each episode is a direct adaptation of a corresponding manga chapter, but every once in a while they do mix and match some of the scenes from nearby chapters. This week we're spared from the run-time being focused almost entirely on Law and Doflamingo and in addition we get a really entertaining scene from Zoro and pica's fight.
This is the portion of the episode that holds up the best, animation-wise, but the actual content is also really amusing. pica's comically high pitched voice is funny on its own, but it reaches it's peak mixture of disturbing and hysterical when he laughs. Their fight in general is one of the most interesting of the bunch as well, since you've got a regular sized Zoro smashing a mountain sized enemy who can move throughout the island with ease thanks to his stone-assimilation powers. There's a lot of room for big spectacle that carries the fight to a lot of different locations.
The most important event to happen in this episode, however, does occur back during Law's fight. Doflamingo has him pretty much beat and lands a nasty blow using something called a “string-saw” attached to his leg to cut Law's arm off. This is a crazy dramatic development for a series like One Piece. There are no expectations that Law might die by the end of the arc, but it's cool to think that permanent damages are still on Oda's mind. This is exactly the kind of edge that feels right for a series like this, which often aims itself at kids and teenagers, but also trusts them to handle violent and scary things. I just like knowing that things can be permanently lost or changed in this show (and to the people current with the manga, I know.)
This episode makes it pretty clear that Law is more-or-less out of the fight now, meaning the focus can change as we build back up to the real, no-holds-barred Luffy vs. Doflamingo fight. We've got a lot of other battles going on in Dressrosa, and we're really, really at the show's mercy right now in terms of how rewarding or exhausting each one can be. Fingers crossed we get more hits than misses with the next upcoming batch of fights.
Manga about novelist, niece also has live-action film opening on June 7― Pony Canyon announced on Friday that Tomoko Yamashita's Ikoku Nikki (Diary of a Strange Land) manga is inspiring a television anime adaptation. The company also revealed a teaser promotional video, a teaser visual, and the show's main staff. Miyuki Oshiro (episode director for Durarara!!×2 Ketsu, Natsume Yūjin-Chō Go, To Your E...
Kaijin Fugeki manga launches on May 29― Manga creator Oh! great announced on Tuesday that he will launch a new manga titled Kaijin Fugeki in Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine on May 29. A Twitter account for the manga also debuted on the same day. Oh! great launched a manga adaptation of NisiOisin's Bakemonogatari novels (pictured at right) in Weekly Shonen Magazine in March 2018, and ended it in Ma...
This week, it's hot monster mommies and less hot AI-generated light novels.― I Support Falin's Crimes We've long joked on the podcast about the quality of light novel writing, but the news is out that the developers of the RyokoAI project have scraped Shosetsuka ni Narou...are fully machine-generated LNs in our future? Plus: Things get gorier in Kaiju No. 8, the world of yatagarasu politics unfolds...
Each story is like a dark portal into a realm of human sexuality that society usually sweeps under the rug, but I can't look away.― Nude Model delivers on the promise of its lurid title. This manga, consisting of three equally intense short stories, is charged with eroticism and danger, with epiphanies lurking around every corner. Created by Tsubasa Yamaguchi, Nude Model is nothing like her most wel...
Find out about the young star who set the internet aflame and walked away with two medals. Plus: Thousand-Year Door updates, a new HunterxHunter game, and Miku!― Welcome back, folks! As is my wont, I'd like to plug my El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron HD Remaster that went up earlier this week... but I've also got the disappointing news that Megaton Musashi W: Wired finally released in the US la...
Daisuke 'Dice' Tsutsumi shares what it was like to leave Pixar and how his studio will never shy away from honesty in their work, even when honesty isn't pretty.― Director Daisuke "Dice" Tsutsumi contributed to films like Toy Story 3 and Monsters University while simultaneously crafting what became his Academy Award-nominated animated short film, The Dam Keeper. His latest short film, Bottle George,...
Chris and Nick put on their headphones and dust off their vinyl records for a look at this season's guitar-strumming, mic-swinging girl groups.― Chris and Nick put on their headphones and dust off their vinyl records for a look at this season's guitar-strumming, mic-swinging girl groups. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News...
I cannot imagine how Square Enix could top themselves after this.― Final Fantasy VII Rebirth initially launched on the last day of February, and if you look at the date of this review's publication, you will immediately be able to discern one thing about this second entry of the FF7 Remake series: It is gargantuan. The first game got plenty of praise (and plenty of flak) for taking the relatively sh...