The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists / The Pirates! Band of Misfits

While Aardman’s latest feature film is a definite hit and a good, solid film, it falls a little short of brilliance by lacking a little vital spark of warmth and heart. Really, though, these are problems not with Aardman but with the source material.

A lively but inept pirate crew love their captain. However, he’s destined for embarrassment when he sets his sights on the Pirate of the Year award, which is based on how much booty each captain brings in. However, a chance encounter with a young Charles Darwin reveals that not is all as it seems with the ship’s parrot, and a harebrained scheme to get rich on a scientific prize is formed. However, lurking in the shadows is the dastardly Queen Victoria – who loathes pirates.

Pirates are of course a firm favourite with kids and show up everywhere in animation, from old adaptations of Treasure Island to One Piece. Pirates of the Caribbean is one of the biggest movie successes of our times and there are ever more stories about space pirates, steampunk pirates and fantasy pirates. The themes are nice and broad, there will always be motivations for every character and yet the violence is always on the cartoonish side. You’re on safe ground with pirates.

And Aardman are nothing if not masters of the little touches. This film is a rapidfire succession of brilliant visual gags and jokes – in three successive shots, there’s a joke about the coin slots on pool tables (to get cannonballs out), a joke about bowling alleys (as the cannonballs appear) and a joke about when dogs put their heads out of car windows. There is lots of very British silliness (how many outside these fair lands recognise that Blue Peter badge?) and the dialogue and characterisation has the air of a pantomime. The plot is simple but funny, with Polly just skirting being called a MacGuffin, and the voice acting is superb – Hugh Grant and David Tennant play off one another expertly and without ever drawing attention to themselves as actors, so that it’s easy to forget they are not simply the clay characters on the screen. Cameos from Lenny Henry, Salma Hayek and especially Brian Blessed are a hoot, and the main crew have an excellent dynamic. Imelda Staunton’s voice couples with a simply brilliant model to make a perfect villain who can look both threatening and hilarious depending on the situation.

The main issues I have are very small, but build up to keep the pirates all at arm’s length. One is the book’s notion that the crew should all lack names. So we get The Pirate Captain, the Pirate with Gout, the Albino Pirate and the Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (who is of course in the Mary Read vein). It all gets a bit laboured and strained and reminds the audience constantly that these are cardboard figures, and awesome scenes about ham can only go so far to redress that. Then there is the way so much of the humour revolves around hurting random stranger by dropping anchors on them and suchlike. Plus making a plot point of ‘Mallet space’ (here, in a luxuriant beard), again preventing the audience forgetting they are watching animation. Finally, I just don’t think the monkey talking through cards in his hand works. It never raises more than a vague smile and isn’t worth the cost in believability. Obviously, these are all individually minor matters and I don’t think that what Pirates! really needed was to be terribly realistic – but the little niggles as I said prevented me from ever really relating to any of the crew, and thus about really caring about any of them. Even the most emotionally accessible member of the crew was known only as ‘Number 2’ or ‘The Pirate with a Scarf’.

This is not to say this isn’t an excellent animated film. It is. I just know Aardman can do much better, and want to see them make something that will touch people, not just tickle at their funny bones. 

One Piece Movie 8: エピソードオブアラバスタ 砂漠の王女と海賊たち/ Episode of Alabasta: the Desert Princess and the Pirates

The real question for this film is…why?

I thought it would make for quite a good idea. Going back to one of the more memorable One Piece arcs and giving it the big-screen, big-budget, bravura animation treatment. After all, Studio Pierrot’s films for their Jump properties often look far, far better than the weekly television show – the most recent Bleach film in particular – and as for just going over the material of the series but making it look nicer, well, that just about worked for Evangelion and Gurren Lagann.

But the trouble is…other than the very last scene – the highlight of the arc – in which Luffy and co hold up their arms to show the sign that links them to Vivi, it really doesn’t look very much better than the weekly series, and at some points far worse. Sure, there are some shots where whole armies are clashing, far beyond what got shown on the series, but mostly it’s jarring CG that doesn’t look right at all and is obviously the same thing copied over and over. There are some lovely fluid moments in the fights, but there were some impressive moments in the series, too, especially in the Sanji/Bon Kurei fight. Here, far too often characters go off-model. So if it doesn’t look much better than the weekly show, that just leaves the retelling of the story.

It doesn’t work. People who don’t know the story aren’t going to know what’s going on at all. It’s an attempt to cram a whole arc into a single film, which means not only do a lot of nice details get left out (Mr Prince, Usopp’s hilarious hammer bluff), but the fights get truncated into nonsensical little snippets that would be better left out or incidental. And the only thing really added is a tiny flash-back for Robin that we wouldn’t see in the series until a fair bit later.

Plus this has always been an arc I’ve found problematic. When I read the manga version back in January 2007 (which was a while after I’d seen the animated version), I wrote, ‘It’s often cited as the highlight of One Piece so far, and while I prefer it to Skypiea or Arlong Park, I really don’t think it’s a great arc. It’s just too sloppy, and I don’t buy that Crocodile’s big plan was to frame the king of a country, start a civil war, make sure a big fight happened in the square in front of the palace, reveal all his plans to the King, kill him and steal his secret weapon then blow up everyone in the square with a bomb, blame the King, seize power and go after the world. I mean, what? I think it’s mostly the bomb part that seems tacked-on. However, One Piece revels in using every cliché in the book to tug at the heartstrings, especially brave sacrifices, and I can’t deny that there’re some really great moments of sheer uplifting cheesiness.’

That still holds. Crocodile had all the cards, had the king captive and the whole kingdom fighting, and still decided he needed a big bomb and that the time to interrogate the king to find the hidden weapon was in the middle of the war, knowing his minions were fighting against powerful opponents. Especially when truncated to its bare bones, I don’t think that the overarching plot works that well – the only time I’ve ever had such a complaint when it comes to One Piece.

This probably ranks as the most pointless animated companion piece to a series I’ve seen yet. At least the next one, another retelling of an existing arc, adds a different flavour by reimagining it with characters who weren’t yet in the series.

One Piece Movie 6: オマツリ男爵と秘密の島 / Omatsuri-danshaku to Himitsu no Shima / Baron Festival and the Secret Island

The sixth One Piece movie was rather different from what I had been expecting. It had a weird, weird art style, which put me in mind of the episodes of Naruto where the art gets really sloppy so that the animation can be exceptionally fluid. Despite the parallel, though, and despite the movie budget here, the visual effect actually wasn’t so impressive and Oda’s exaggerated expressions really didn’t look right in the style – a problem compounded by them being held far too long. While it’s respectable to try something different, I was not very keen on the aesthetic, and ended up suspecting too much of the budget went on the impressive CG – because most of the One Piece movies have superior animation and art.

On the other hand, the plot grew from something really unimaginative (The Davy Back Fight – the movie!) into something very dark, with some genuinely nightmarish visuals. Some of the decisions made towards the end were quite brave…but it’s still probably been the One Piece movie I’ve enjoyed least.

Only later did I discover that this was the first feature film directed by Hosoda Mamoru, who only a year later would make the beautifully-told and very nice-looking Toki-o Kakeru Shoujo and then the stunning Summer Wars. He had previously only worked on episodes of Ojamajo Doremi and Digimon, as well as the first two half-hour Digimon films. Despite the latter two plus a third from another director being truncated into ‘Digimon The Movie’ for the West, this was his first feature-length work as a director.

Well, I can’t say I’m not pleased he got the chance. He’s a big star now. I just wish I’d liked his One Piece film more.

(Expanded from impressions, 29.5.07)

ワンピース: カラクリ城のメカ巨兵/ One Piece movie 7: Giant Mecha Soldier of Karakuri Castle

I found the seventh One Piece movie disappointing in almost exactly the same way as the Naruto movie I had seen not long before, Bonds: it had a functional plot, although ultimately not a very interesting one because the stakes were so low and the bad guy’s motivation was so general and non-specific, plus it didn’t have the stylish art and animation of a Jump movie. One of the main draws of these big-screen versions is that they bring with them stunning visuals.

Then there were two other big rants: firstly, this was during the period that Chopper’s voice actress was off sick, so there’s someone else filling in with a rather different performance, which just seemed wrong. And secondly…there’s the little animators’ joke of making Nami’s boobs bounce at inappropriate times. It looks like there’s something seriously wrong with her and she’s twitching. It’s a joke taken too far, made so prominent it’s impossible not to notice, and it’s just awful.

Revolving around a throwaway plot involving a genius mechanic and the very unique island he lives on, it begins with an intriguing set-up and seems to hint at a clever reveal, but ultimately the antagonist’s ambitions don’t tally with his character and, let’s be honest, were never really going to work for him. This movie was not good enough for a filler episode of the main series, let alone a big-screen adaptation.

(slightly expanded from impressions, 13.8.09)

ONE PIECE THE MOVIE デッドエンドの冒険 / One Piece the Movie: Deddo Endo no Bouken / One Piece movie 4: Dead End Adventure

The fourth One Piece movie was, I felt, far better than the third one.

The Straw Hat crew find themselves in desperate need of some cash. Luckily, there is a race with a big prize pot to enter. But of course, things aren't that simple.

While the plot centres on the race, the real story was grounded in typical One Piece themes: family reunions, traumatic childhoods leading to obsessions and passion, and lashings of drama alongside hyperactive action sequences. Considering it wasn’t written by Oda Eiichiro, the manga's creator, it was very much in the spirit of the series, and an extremely fun movie in its own right.

Gaspard is a nice proud antagonist, but perhaps could have been more compelling. There are also some liberties taken with what the Straw Hats can do, especially Robin, but it all works and it's not as though Devil Fruit powers are all that well-defined.

(originally written 5.6.05, slightly expanded)

ワンピース/ One Piece (pre-timeskip)

One Piece’s timeskip really didn’t make as much difference as most timeskips do, but it provides a useful place to stop and write impressions, as well as to dig up thoughts originally written in 2005. Here's what I wrote back on March 8 of that year:

‘One Piece is one of the most wildly successful anime of the past ten years, with an episode count well over 100 and twice as many chapters of the manga released. It has a huge following, and has been dubbed into English (albeit in a fashion even worse than FMA, for not only is it generic and poorly acted, but every gun, cigarette and drop of blood seems to have been changed).

The premise is a simple one: Monkey D. Luffy is a young boy who has only one aim – to become the Pirate King. In a world dominated by pirates, he gathers around himself a crew of nakama, or close comrades.

There is Zoro, the master swordsman and ex-bounty hunter. There is Nami, a clever young thief with a dark past. There is Usopp, a great teller of tall tales. There is Sanji, the chef and lady’s man whose kick is without equal. Later, there are others, including Vivi, a princess in disguise, and Chopper, the fuzzy little hat-wearing reindeer who is one of the cutest things in any anime.

In the world of One Piece, there exist many ‘Devil’s fruits’, which bestow a life of great power on those who eat them, but when they come into contact with seawater, their bodies cease to be able to move. Why these people invariably pursue a life of piracy and spend their days floating on the one thing that would be lethal to them is another question, but in One Piece, it is the kryptonite to many characters’ super-powers.

Luffy has eaten the gomu-gomu fruit, which endows upon him the bizarre ability to stretch his body like rubber, and the momentum of a fist on the end of an arm extended a dozen or more meters behind and then swung forward gives him a punch like a bullet from a pistol. The plot moves slowly, with simple ideas and long fight sequences. Generally, the pirate crew find themselves on a new island, where they find either a person in need of help or someone from their own pasts, discover a dire situation through a series of flashbacks, and then go and fight with whatever wicked person has caused the situation. Sound silly? It’s meant to be.

One Piece is unsophisticated, escapist fun that will occasionally pull your heart-strings in some really moving and elegant ways. Always worth watching, and occasionally ingenious - if never likely to top my list of best anime ever - I remain very glad that I undertook the daunting task of watching such a gigantic series as this. I feel I know these characters now; what could be better than that?’

Six years on, with the anime now at 500 episodes, and One Piece exceeded all my expectations: it certainly is within my list of best anime ever, certainly the manga is probably by third-favourite of all time, after Hikaru no Go and Yotsubato!. I seemingly wrote that during the Drum Rockies arc, which ended with one of the best emotional pay-offs of any anime ever. Since that, Nico Robin, Frankie and Brooke have joined the crew, each with a fascinating story. One Piece proved it could do fillers better than any other shounen, and with the Whitebeard war, provided the most epic conflict I’ve ever seen in a battle manga. More so than any other series, it can move its audience between laughing helplessly and holding back tears in moments. Oda managed to create a world that perfectly balances humour and seriousness, and that is why One Piece outdoes Naruto, Bleach, HunterXHunter or anything else action-oriented Shounen Jump has run since Dragonball Z.

Movies
Movie 4: link
Movie 6: link
Movie 7: link
Movie 8: link

どうぶつ宝島 / Doubutsu Takarajima / Animal Treasure Island

Here is another chance to see Toei in its golden age, making wholesome family entertainment, and also to see the young Miyazaki cutting his teeth back in '71 as adapter and key animator. This is childish fare, an adaptation of Treasure Island, simplified, made into a slapstick adventure and with all the characters except for the central kids made into loveable animals. The Disney influence is strong, with musical numbers (albeit not actually sung by the characters) and a totally superfluous animal sidekick who is little more than an extension of Jim’s psyche, only slightly more irritating. Often these Ghibli prototype films - and indeed those by Ghibli when it was formed - have cutesy characters that turn out to have a lot of personality and become fascinating in and of themselves, but that is not the case here.

However, this is an excellent example of a kids’ animation film and has some real moments of that Toei genius. Long John Silver is a pig (one of the more obvious of Miyazaki’s fingerprints) and while he is capable of being cruel, even murderous, he is also presented in a humorous style, the butt of jokes and certainly not too formidable to have pratfalls. There is never much seriousness in the action, and lots of amusing visual jokes. Crowd scenes are extremely detailed and inventive, and a lot of the action setpieces towards the end are both silly and clever, much like the frenetic sequences Pixar garner praise for several decades later.

Jim and Cathy are flimsy characters but likeable ones, and though she is the damsel in distress occasionally, Cathy is strong and cool and is probably in distress only as much as Jim is, and their roles are somewhat interchangeable. Both look very young, which is perhaps fitting for the target audience.

On occasion the animation standard slips, like when Silver and Jim are tumbling down a cliff and Jim is essentially a static object turning on an axis, or when you can see an error where a log keeps poking onto the screen right at the end, but in general there is a lot of complexity here, and the art is bold but not so simple that the animation becomes unimpressive. It is not as fun or idiosyncratic as Puss in Boots, and certainly not as clever or intriguing as Gauche the Cellist, but it is great entertainment from a studio at its prime.

(originally written 9.10.08)