One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island
Oh man...
Gotta give this an 8/10. Would say 9/10 but I'm not sure, don't want to try and give it a really high rating right after watching it since it may seem like recency bias. Gotta let it marinate in my mind a bit, but man that was a great movie.
I was most impressed with the animation here. I'm usually not that impressed with the animation of One Piece, especially modern One Piece, as it is very high quality but can be way too flashy and fast paced a lot of the time.
This, however, was really consistent and fluid. The characters look more unique here, not sure how to describe it, but they look more lively and expressive and it's very helpful for some of the emotional scenes.
The voice acting is pretty good, but it usually is, so that's no surprise. Luffy's voice actress never fails to give a great performance in any One Piece related content.
Another strong point of the movie was the characters as well as the tension. This movie actually makes you feel something when you learn the story of the characters, especially the villain, and it makes you feel like Luffy and his crew might not be able to win this battle.
And yet you still don't see the villain as an actual, traditional villain. He's doing this unbelievably evil and torturous act to Luffy and his friends, but, it just feels like he's trying to find temporary solutions to numb his own pain than anything else. You still can't help but feel raw pity for him and the struggle he's had to endure.
Oda lets us see pirate crews get destroyed multiple times throughout the story, but we don't really see how terrible the effects of these defeats are. Only characters like Moria gave us a glimpse into how much utter defeat can shatter a character, but Moria was introduced years after this movie came out. So this movie did a great job at fleshing that idea out and really diving into how much a crushing defeat drives characters insane.
Baron Omatsuri was unironically a better villain than any villain I've seen in OP from recent years, in my opinion (besides Xebec). Though I'm aware that, with people like Sommers, that could be a hot take, but I don't care.
I only wish that modern OP was written like this. I know people say it a lot and it might start to get annoying to hear this complaint over and over, but seriously, this is what we've needed all along. We need real tension, villains who are actually deep and don't just have vague lines that are never expanded on (looking at you Kaido), and we need a Luffy that actually takes things seriously when he has to.
