One Piece: Strong World (2009)

Having dabbled a bit in One Piece the last few years, I thought I'd try one of the larger, standalone films they released.

Basically, a big name pirate no one's seen in 20 years reappears. He gets mixed up with the Straw Hats via two threads: One, he figures out their navigator Nami is excellent at detecting storms, which he and his gravity manipulation powers are vulnerable to. (I guess because having a floating island caught in a hurricane is bad.)

Two, he plans to take over the world with an army of wildlife he forcibly evolved into very strong and lethal forms - like a giant duck that produces lightning, or an army of ants that strip flesh from bones in seconds - and he's going to give them a test run on the East Blue, the sea where half the Straw Hats hail from.

The movie starts in media res, the crew scattered among Shiki's islands, dealing with various lethal monsters. Maybe 20 minutes in, it flashes back to explain everything. I don't know if it's an effective approach, since the running around didn't seem to be getting anywhere. It wasn't as though the crew was learning things during this stretch, and then we'd get context from the flashback. It was more like Tom & Jerry chasing each other with frying pans. Action for the sake of it or for the sake of padding.

Along the lines of padding, there's this whole bit where Nami leaves a recording for the crew, allegedly to convince them to not risk their lives trying to rescue her. The movie plays coy about what she said, remaining silent when she initially records it, then letting us hear part of it, but not all. They keep doing it, as though it's some important mystery. Because the part we do hear sounds like she's insulting Luffy. Or like she's trying to intentionally rile him up so he'll fight better.

The hook of Shiki threatening the East Blue works pretty well, especially since it's filtered through Nami. Nami already spent ten years working for a ruthless pirate that conquered her home, even going so far as to betray Luffy once. Whereas most of the others are always confident they'd win any fight, Nami's a bit more realistic about what happens if you challenge power and fail. So there's the push-and-pull to trust her friends, but also protect her family back home the only way she can think of.

Shiki is a mixture of menacing and ridiculous. The man cut his legs off to escape prison and replaced them with swords, and left one village on his islands safe when he floated them into the sky so he could test his creations on them. He also has part of a ship's wheel stuck in his head, keeps calling Nami "babycakes" and confuses his gorilla lieutenant with various members of his family. Cruel, but absurd.

Most of them attempts at humor don't land, but I don't know if that's an issue with translation or I just didn't think it was funny. The one that did was when his chief scientist, who looks like a clown and has shoes that make fart noises, walks into the command room and goes through an elaborate semaphore routine, which Shiki correctly interprets (for the only time in the movie), and the clown is gobsmacked by this. He can talk, he just doesn't sometimes. I don't know.

The animation's pretty good quality. The scenery looks very nice, the monsters are visually interesting, the fights are brief but fairly cool. The story really didn't seem like it had enough for the entire crew to do, but it was alright.