The popular manga series One Piece by Eiichiro Oda released in late 90s and was later adapted into anime series. The anime series is one of the most popular series all around the world. It is the popularity of the series has completed more than 900 episodes, and it’s not just the case with the anime series but this recent movie is the 14th movies to be released so far. The first few films were the short movies with the duration of just 50 or few more minutes but later they began to release long feature movies from the franchise that featured early arcs of the series with advanced animation and summarized stories. Oda started to write scripts and designing characters of the movie himself after the release of 9th movie and the story and character designed in these movies were used in the main plot of the series.
One Piece: Stampede is also one of these movies that is produced and designed under the supervision of Oda himself as he designed two new characters in this movie. In addition to this the anime series released two episodes covering backstory of the movie.
Talking about the story of One Piece: Stampede, it is quite ordinary, compared to the other movies of the franchise or any other recent films by Shonen Jump. This movie introduces a new giant and bulky villain, Douglas Bullet who used to be part of Gol. D Roger’s crew who was confined in Impel Down and released when Blackbeard raided the prison, an even that occurred in one of the arcs of the series. With the obsession of being the most powerful and strongest man living on Earth, after losing a fight against Roger as he never got to have a math again with him, he partnered with Buena Festa. Bueno is the new character who is said to hold gathering of pirates known as “Pirates’ World Fair” a long time ago. Together they plan to summon all the powerful pirates for Bullet to win against them all and be the strongest among them but Festa is scheming something bigger and beyond.
To commemorate the 20 years of anime, Pirates’ World Fair is a good idea that brings some old characters from the series other than Straw Hat crew. Some of them are the favorites characters of the fans which includes Luffy’s peers Trafalgar Law, Smoker, Eustass Kid, Warlords and many more other that we won’t mention as we don’t want to spoilt it for you. Although most of the One Piece movies are known to feature a “big cinematic fight” in the last 20 minutes of the movie, but in this movie we have Douglas Bullet’s fighting scene that goes on for 30 minutes that is a little ruthless. Too much emphasize on CGI during the battle scene was a little disappointing to me but overall it was fascinating to watch through the movie and the animation was also compelling throughout the movie.
We have been watching movies from some well-known franchise like Dragon Ball and My Hero Academia and the one common thing in all these movies are that they all feature some thrilling and eye-catching epic battle scenes that makes it even more fascination with the use of both 2D and 3D animation to end the movie on an exciting note. Same is the case with One Piece: Stampede except for the final battle that holds up most of the major part of the movie. The movie features some old and new characters with cameos of the fan-favorites that goes back to the early series in the past 20 years. Stampede is the movie for all the fans of One Piece series. Although, newcomers won’t be able to fully enjoy the movie because of the characters and some part of the story but nonetheless the movie is breathtaking to watch even for the new fans who like to watch action-packed anime.
