Yeah, this episode was pretty GOAT, and that is entirely due to the direction, the storyboarding and how great Luffy's speech was. Tanaka absolutely nailed it. Holy crap. I could not have been happier.
The animation this episode was pretty solid, the main highlights being in the first half early on with the allies vs the Udon guards, however, the second half also had some cool moments, like Luffy throwing the prisoners or Babanuki exploding.
The art throughout the episode was consistently great, and there was also a nice level of animation to the character acting of the prisoners who got shot that really sells the agony they were in. Great stuff on that front. Hirotaka Ito's art was fantastic in the second half.
Masahiro Kitazaki is presumed to have done a lot of stuff in the early part of the episode. He did that headliner shooting the prisoners and a lot of the transformation stuff, as well as this really cool bit of action. He did a lot of the nicer art in the first half of the episode, along with corrections from Keeichi Ichikawa.
Yoshihiro Kitano is presumed to have done this scene. Although I think some of it is a bit rough, I think its all conceptually really cool stuff. I think Kawamatsu's river retribution still looks really devastating.
Toei Phils animator Dennis Cablao is presumed to have animated Luffy throwing the prisoners, which has some nice timing to it as he slams the prisoners down.
And Babanuki exploding is presumed to have been animated by Hirotaka Ito himself, the animation director for the second half of the episode. This was a really cool scene, even though Babanuki is unfortunately dimmed(him exploding has some really cool sketchiness to it). I got serious hokuto no ken vibes from Babanuki getting turned into flames at the end of it.
Directionally, the music placement was absolutely on point, with every OST matching up perfectly and enhancing the dialogue and visuals. Hell, despite the limited content covered, the pacing for the episode was actually really nice. Since this episode had a lot to take in visually in terms of the scale of the prisoners, there was a lot the director did to sell the horror of the situation, like seeing prisoners getting massacred and turned into 'mummy's.
Overall, an absolute banger of an episode. I couldn't have been happier with how that turned out(though I still feel like Mummy could have had a more interesting effect as opposed to just being green mold).
Next episode looks like its going to be really good as well. At least in the directional sense.