Title: "Fighting Music! A Power That Hurts Even Luffy!"
Chapters Covered: rest of 980
Episode Director: Shigeyasu Yamauchi
Animation Director: Majiro + LEE
Time: 8:30PM EST
Watch It: www.crunchyroll.com/one-piece
This is notably the first One Piece episode Yamauchi has directed in eighteenish years since early Skypiea. Majiro has a number of character design and chief AD credits under her belt (22/7, Kabukibu!, Macross Delta). I have no idea who LEE is.
Kid's attack - Episode 986: https://bittube.tv/post/85e46817-1347-41b4-b51d-d42e17819c7e
One Piece Episode 987 Preview
Great episode. I really like the ending of the episode with Kidd's attack transformation and head on attack towards Apoo. Plus I like the static tv lines they're using whenever Kidd was on screen during the transformation and during his attack.
"Is it something that triggers them" Stay classy Crunchyroll!
Mates, that was a weird episode. Idk what the director was doing. The quietest episode is the Apoo episode—lacking both music, rhythm, and background noises at many points. Then the weird Punk Gibson line filter that would be fine if it was less used and more consistently used. Not sure why it disappears and comes back at the end. Some really great action cuts in there, and I loved the character acting as Luffy and Zoro flee. Pretty ballsy to stick with one scene the whole episode. Can’t wait to see One Pace cut this by a third.
Last episode there were two really good cuts of Zoro walking against a flow of people that I loved.
The animation was crisp, aside from a couple shots of Queen that looked a little weird. And of course we had the obligatory Tama flashbacks because there's apparently a quota to fill. Other than some stalling when Kid was gathering weapons, the pacing wasn't as terrible as usual this week.
They got to be trolling with how quite the episode was for the apoo fight.
Art and animation quality was kinda all over the place this week. Lots of brief dynamic shots mixed with lots of still frames, and Kid was constantly flip-flopping between looking super badass and super off-model.
Strangest episode to date. Some sort of unease about the whole thing. So many things to point out.
There were lots of well animated shots, but unfortunately the editing didn't allow it to shinel. The way each shot is cut is specifically frantic. All the build up or emphasis is incorrect, enough to give you anxiety. It's like they produced way too many shots and struggled to squeeze them all in.
7:35 There's a shot where the camera pans to the right, then back to the left, just to almost of focus on Apoo then it just cuts. It would make sense if it was trying to replicate a character POV, but no character standing that close to Apoo. Seems really amateurish:
11:17 There's this one guy dancing or cheering, but no music.
14:52 Camera tilts top to bottom, bouncing slightly back up. There was absolutely no need for it to bounce.
I can understand why there's a lack of fitting music. Even though One Piece has a huge library of music by now there's nothing really to fit the scene. That new drumbeat track suited when it played the first time, but then the second time there wasn't much excitement, and then third time…. they could have easily picked up the tempo, a lot of missed opportunities. Honestly the composer can get away with not putting much effort into the track itself, its only purpose is for this episode.
Every shot of Luffy, Zoro and Apoo were pretty good, although Apoo is aesthetically frightening by nature at times. The shots of Queen and the background characters were all kinds of outsourced weird on top of being inconsistent.
Aren't gifters typically hybirds? This is a straight up bear:
Many of Kid's faces were inconsistent. What makes it worse is the flashback with his face done by DBZ style guy. This one inparticular face is a character from Superjail:
….and those post production static filters were terrible, looking identical in each shot, detracting from any decent animation. Big headache. They need stop using these special effects unless they have value.
This was a super odd angle (every other angle was from the left, why include this?). I had trouble understanding what I was looking at… Kid's character and Apoo's stage are completely missing.
Is this the first time Zoro cut a neck?
I think that covers most of it.
This episode was WILD. Just…so tonally different from anything I've seen with this series. A bit more violence than you typically get on One Piece, what with the neck slicing, the guy's comically crushed head, and a very detailed and bloody tooth being knocked out of someone's mouth. The sound design was very interesting, giving off a very...disconcerting vibe. When Apoo is fighting, everything else seems to go silent, and you can hear much more emphasis being placed on the sound effects as opposed to just stock music.
And so many character faces were just...again, the only word I can think of to accurately describe this episode was...WILD! It's almost like they let the animators just do what they wanted.
The storyboarding was great too, IMO. I can't wait to see what Skippy thought of this one.
Great episode. Yamauchi's current style truly shines here, although I see why it can be scary for people unfamiliar with him lol.
This was a super odd angle (every other angle was from the left, why include this?). I had trouble understanding what I was looking at… Kid's character and Apoo's stage are completely missing.
I'm pretty sure the implication is that Kid punched him straight through the wall and we're now seeing the other side of said wall.
I have so mixed feelings about this episode, even if leaning more toward the bad ones.
So, animation has some medium-high points I can't negate, but a lot of misplaced cameras, weird expressions, off-model faces (especially Queen and Kid) quite disturbed my perception. Even pacing has some dead moments (specially Queen, "Surprise!" and "Apoo…" moments were kinda... wth?). The highlight is clearly Punk Gibson, but even there Kid's off-model faces and body made me kinda felling meh. His fruit's TV lines effect was a relatively good idea, but keeping it for the whole ending scene (which was already kinda dragged) easily made it annoying. In the end the no-rumour moments were a good idea too, but misplaced. Even after the attack hit Apoo we slide on a side-view which magically doesn't show any people around (which is odd as we saw the place is brimmed. Apoo's repetetive attacks is instead a predictable thing which I kinda expect since I read the chapter.
But I was talking about "mixed feelings", so here's the good one: Kid is crazy. This episode succeeds to show how a mad dog our magnet man is in a way the manga didn't since the crossed pirates scene before the timeskip. I recognize here the man back at Sabaody we acknowledge as a crazy f*cked in mind pirate which killed whoever laughed at him until he obtained supernova highest bounty. And this is really, really good.
That apoo…
! giving luffy and Zoro more trouble then kaidou and big mom.
@uniaka:
That apoo…
! giving luffy and Zoro more trouble then kaidou and big mom.
For once this scene of Luffy struggling big-time actually isn't filler bullshit though. Apoo really did cause Luffy and Zoro serious damage including literally making Luffy explode in the manga as well.
Beating a dead horse but jeez, if the episode centers on a guy who attacks with music….. put some music in the episode
Lots of off-angle shots, swaying movement, the camera shoved right up in front of whatever the shot's subject is…yep, this was undeniably a Yamauchi episode alright lol It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea, but I did actually enjoy how off-kilter the episode was, and that supercut montage of Kid crazyfaces towards the beginning was absolutely hysterical.
At the end though they were clearly having trouble getting Kid's hand-drawn, two-dimensional body to jive with the computer-animation, three-dimensional giant metal trash arm.
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At the end though they were clearly having trouble getting Kid's hand-drawn, two-dimensional body to jive with the computer-animation, three-dimensional giant metal trash arm.
While Kid's CG arms make all the sense in the world considering how they have always struggled to get that thing to move, from what I can tell it seems to be doing that typical thing that CG in anime likes to do where it's moving at 24fps despite nothing else in the frame doing so. If they'd just lower the framerate to match Kid it might look a lot more seamless. Also the sequence felt like it couldn't quite decide if Kid's jump was pulling the arm or if the arm was pulling Kid along, so it looked like he was kinda just awkwardly drifting through the air.
There was so many more interesting gifters in the manga chapter than the episode shows. It was such a wasted opportunity.
