MOVIE: One Piece Film – Red (2022)

One Piece Film: RedYear: 2022Rating: PG-13Length: 115 minutes / 1.92 hours One challenge of making movies for such a long-running anime series like One Piece is that there are so many characters and aspects of the canon that it's hard to make a film that includes fan-favorite characters in a way that makes sense with the overall story. With Eiichiro Oda on board for One Piece Film: Red (2022), we finally have a movie that could easily be part of the canon for the series while also having stakes high enough to warrant the characters who appear to save the world. While I definitely enjoy One Piece movies that string together powerful moves from the best characters, like Stampede (2019) did, most of the time the villains for these movies are so separated from the series as to be completely inconsequential. For Red, including Shanks' family was a smart way to make the story relevant to the wider One Piece world without...
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MOVIE: One Piece – Stampede (2019)

One Piece: Stampede Year: 2019 Rating: PG-13 Length: 101 minutes / 1.68 hours It’s interesting how different Japanese franchises handle their 20th-anniversary movies. In the case of Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You (2017), a nostalgia tactic was used to bring in those viewers who might not have seen a Pokémon movie since the anime started airing back in 1997. Two years later, and another well-known anime (or at least it should be well known) has a movie that celebrates the 20th year of its animated series. One Piece: Stampede (2019) takes a somewhat different tactic here and embraces everything that turned it into what it is today. While anime movies rarely interact with the canon of the series they’re based on, it is essential to note that the author of the original manga did help create the story for Stampede. The reason why this is important is that this movie was able to bring together 20 years’ worth of extraordinarily overpowered and unique characters in a way...
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