Given my schedule I should be in bed instead of staying up watching my pirate cartoon but what can you do?

Won't say much at the moment other than that was really nice. Ito didn't really expand ''much'' on Kaido's flashback compared to what was in the manga (much like when he did the bit of Roger at Laugh Tale) but just giving the material room to breathe instead of cramming it into small, cluttered panels elevated what was there so much and made it feel like that much less of an afterthought. Not to mention the direction and animation did so much for it; I'm not surprised that Chansard got to draw a lot of Kaido's younger selves. Out of all the animators who handled the character during this long arc he really owned that design and all of its forms.

So ultimately it wasn't Shida who handled the finishing blow but Tu. No surprise there really, lol. Most of the big regular names popped up here and there throughout the episode - Shida, Tomita, Thurlow, Chansard, and Tu, etc. - but there were still a few surprises like Toshiyuki Sato (big-name freelancer who's all over the place) and a couple Studio Pierrot Naruto team regulars, probably thanks to Thurlow, - Masayuki Kouda, jay1jay1jay1, and Chengxi Huang. I suppose they could use the work now that the Naruto/Boruto anime has finally been put out to pasture!

I watched both 1064 and 1065 back to back. I wasn't expecting all that much from 1064 and ended up being quite pleasantly surprised! They stretched a fighting chapter out to a full episode's length without feeling draggy, the animation was very solid, and Kaido's antics were quite fun ("Lightning Hammered" was a fantastic pun)! Tessho Genda got to flex his range here (did you know that at one point he voiced George Costanza in Seinfeld's JP dub?).

1065 was pretty solid too. Very pleasantly surprised to see a lengthy scene done by Yu Yoshiyama, one of the more interesting animators to come out of Toei's orbit in recent years. I'm really curious to learn who animated that infamous grim reaper panel since that style of hyper-fluid, loose animation isn't something you see in Toei shows all that often, not even in the Naoki Tate episodes of yore.

@karubiDON said in 1074: ''Believe in Momo - Luffy's Final Move!'':

Did anyone notice the ドン！！ impact frame when Luffy grabbed the clouds?? Amazing sequence!!

There's one point where the lightning forms the Norse runes for "hope" as well.

I think I appreciate the opening more after giving it a few more listens and catching on to the fact that the song is about Luffy and Momonosuke's relationship and how it's framed - a chunk of the footage is from Momonosuke's POV and his face is pointedly not shown until the very end. I think if maybe ten seconds or so were shaved off of the montage at the beginning or the O was larger so you could see the footage more clearly (I suspect it's the size it is to account for subtitles and closed captions) that would be perfect, because the actual new footage is lovely and the montage of episode clips at the end feels like a tribute to all the hard work the staff has done over the past four (!) years.

In the episode itself I still can't get over how creative and cool that cut of Luffy turning that bolt of lightning into a glowing blue bouncing rubberband is - it's a perfect example of fully taking advantage of a different medium to elevate the source material (Luffy just spun around it like it was a pole in the manga) and illustrate just how wild Luffy's awakened rubberization power is. Even if I don't like some of the lore behind it stuff like that justifies Gear Fifth's existence to me.

I also have to give props to Tessho Genda's acting during Kaido's monologue about Haki trumping all. You can almost taste the sour grapes oozing out of his mouth there.

I actually watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners recently too. It wasn't a revolutionary story for the genre but it was told and directed well and it furthers my belief that Imaishi's best works are ones where there are additional voices involved to rein in and more effectively channel his excesses compared to being completely unfettered. The otherwise dark and tragic finale turning into sci-fi Blues Brothers for a hot minute was a great example of that.

Mob Psycho 100's final season wasn't as bombastic production-wise as the second one was (episode 5 of season 2 is still the most insane thing I've ever seen done with TV animation) but it really stuck its landing. Once in a lifetime series, once in a lifetime adaptation. What a show, so warm and profound in its groundedness and simplicity.

And then The Witch from Mercury's first cour ended...finally after all the preempted airings. I can see the formulaic pacing and dryness of some of the exposition being a turn-off, and I'm sure there are more than a few veteran Gundam fans who hate Witch with a passion, but I had a ton of fun watching week-to-week, helped along by the extremely robust and hilarious meme train it has. It helps that on the surface the direction and writing is often extremely, extremely unsubtle but then once you take a step back and reexamine there's actually quite a bit of subtlety in the theming and characterization if you know when to look. And that season finale, oh man...

In the back of my mind I'm a little concerned over where some of the show's mystery boxes might take things once opened, but I need it to be April already.

That track wasn't actually new, it was from Stampede. Amusingly enough in the movie it was explicitly the Supernovas' theme but it was also included in the anime's latest OST release under the new name "Eustass Kid's Theme".

By this point in the manga I had kinda mentally checked out on Onigashima so I had absolutely no memory of how this fight was resolved aside from being a bit salty that it ended up being my favorite non-Law/Kid Supernova that ended up going down with the ship (Hawkins) instead of the one who deserved it more (Apoo). The solution for getting past the voodoo shield was pretty clever and simple; gotta hand it to Oda for that. And of course how that scene was depicted in the episode was great too, it looks like Masami Mori served as a stealth action animation director for that Killer/Hawkins clash just like he did for the Sanji vs. Queen and King bit in Tokuno's previous episode.

I continue to be surprised at what the anime can get away with showing in comparison to its peers, likely due to the grandfather clause; that amputation was surprisingly gruesome but I shouldn't be surprised after how the Kiku amputation scene earlier was handled (ie not censored at all).

Stretch-an'-squash and rubberhose is like...the diametric opposite of the limited animation style that anime lives by lol

I can just imagine some animator receiving the Gear Fifth design sheets or reading chapter 1044 for the first time and saying "thank god it's just Luffy with Super Saiyan hair" only to go "fuck you, Oda" when they turn to the next few pages.

Ishitani's section of the storyboard starts around where Kaido coils onto the ground after giant Luffy throws him and covers all the scenes under the Onigashima dome, at least up until the eyecatch and probably the part right after when Luffy pulls his head out of the hole and Nami's yelling at Marco.

But yeah, Ishitani didn't actually direct any part of this episode. The downside to her fame amongst the fanbase is people attributing every bit of good directing to her like the other directors don't exist (Yasunori Koyama? Ryosuke Tanaka? Ryota Nakamura? Nanami Michibata? etc.) and spamming her twitter account asking if she'll be on an upcoming episode.

Hiroshi Iwasaki gobbling down one last chunk of scenery on his way out the door.

The content of the covered chapter was mostly recounting information that the audience/readership had been very much already made aware of multiple times over the course of the arc and interrupted the fight's finisher so the episode was going to live or die by the quality of its directing. Fortunately Koyama directed the ever-loving crap out of it; that whole sequence where there's no BGM outside of that industrial clanking felt genuinely gripping and harrowing, and I'm genuinely surprised that Toei kept that noose hanging on the tree in the background. I want to say that sort of thing was omitted in earlier episodes but this arc's been going on for so long that I've probably just forgotten lol

I expected the episode to be largely carried by its direction and art but then Tu just busted out three straight minutes of key animation for the Blazing Dragon Drum sequence. Based on the preview my kneejerk reaction to the possibility of Shida handling the Bajrang Gun finisher is...disappointment? He's done Luffy finishers before and he's so idiosyncratic as an animator that you already know what you're going to get just from seeing his name attached to something. I was hoping for Kojima or some other big name heavyweight from outside the usual One Piece crew to handle it. We'll see, maybe there's more to come. Kaido's flashback should definitely be more than an afterthought this time!

Absolutely. Like Shigeshige spends most of the story being a walking cringe comedy punchline, and then to have him

? Brought me to the end of tears.

I feel like it takes a really exceptional writer to pull off such a disarming switch between crude, gross-out humor (not to say that Gintama doesn't have a lot of genuine wit and cleverness to its gags!) to something like that and make it work. Recently I saw that style of writing referred to as "artisanal shit-posting" and I can't think of a better description for Sorachi's method than that.

Just got back from seeing the film.

As far as the Films go I'll put RED in the same ballpark as GOLD so I enjoyed it even if it's less cohesive than the latter movie and less newcomer-friendly. Strong World and Z are still the ones to beat and RED did feel like another take on Z's formula even past the surface-level simularities. While I did joke that the premise of Shanks secretly having a daughter who's also a pop idol and Luffy's childhood friend is a very 2022 One Piece plot, and RED is very much 2020s One Piece, I'll echo the sentiment that after four years of Wano purgatory it was nice to have a more (relatively) self-contained story with a solid, even surprising, emotional core and without most of the baggage that's dogged my enjoyment of the story lately.

Honestly Luffy being surrounded by the sky boat lanterns after defeating Kaido was an image that I had figured Oda was planning ever since the things were introduced and I was quite surprised that he didn't go for it in the end. Satoshi Ito may not be as flashy as a director as say, Ishitani or Koyama, but he's been doing good work ever since he handled Senor Pink's backstory and this episode proves that the show is in good hands going forward (context: Ito has been the "head" series director for a number of months now; Nagamine is still one of them currently, but not the main one).

Given my schedule I should be in bed instead of staying up watching my pirate cartoon but what can you do?

Won't say much at the moment other than that was really nice. Ito didn't really expand ''much'' on Kaido's flashback compared to what was in the manga (much like when he did the bit of Roger at Laugh Tale) but just giving the material room to breathe instead of cramming it into small, cluttered panels elevated what was there so much and made it feel like that much less of an afterthought. Not to mention the direction and animation did so much for it; I'm not surprised that Chansard got to draw a lot of Kaido's younger selves. Out of all the animators who handled the character during this long arc he really owned that design and all of its forms.

So ultimately it wasn't Shida who handled the finishing blow but Tu. No surprise there really, lol. Most of the big regular names popped up here and there throughout the episode - Shida, Tomita, Thurlow, Chansard, and Tu, etc. - but there were still a few surprises like Toshiyuki Sato (big-name freelancer who's all over the place) and a couple Studio Pierrot Naruto team regulars, probably thanks to Thurlow, - Masayuki Kouda, jay1jay1jay1, and Chengxi Huang. I suppose they could use the work now that the Naruto/Boruto anime has finally been put out to pasture!

Think at any point one of the Flower Capital revelers looked up and shrugged off the sight of the thunderstorm, giant flaming, floating skull, huge lava dragon, and massive black fist in the sky overhead?

Title: "The World that Luffy Wants!"
Chapters Covered: 1049
Episode Director: Satoshi Ito
Animation Director: Yong-ce Tu + Ziwei He
Watch It: www.crunchyroll.com/one-piece

I don't really see the problem with the people of Wano themselves. It's said outright in the manga that Orochi's power comes from Kaido's backing so even if someone like Denjiro or Ashura assassinated Orochi in the twenty years since the takeover all that would change is that Kaido would implement the New Onigashima Project ahead of schedule. Orochi was a weakling outside of his Devil Fruit sure, but Kaido could've probably razed all of Wano all by himself if he wanted, to say nothing of the giant army that he brought with him.

Now Whitebeard, I think the intent was that he didn't want to risk a massively destructive battle that would've turned Wano into a parking lot and/or greatly upset the current balance of power but this is the same guy who lead his entire confederation into ruin at Marineford so you have to chalk it up to a creaky, after-the-fact justification for the sake of the narrative.

Hiroshi Iwasaki gobbling down one last chunk of scenery on his way out the door.

The content of the covered chapter was mostly recounting information that the audience/readership had been very much already made aware of multiple times over the course of the arc and interrupted the fight's finisher so the episode was going to live or die by the quality of its directing. Fortunately Koyama directed the ever-loving crap out of it; that whole sequence where there's no BGM outside of that industrial clanking felt genuinely gripping and harrowing, and I'm genuinely surprised that Toei kept that noose hanging on the tree in the background. I want to say that sort of thing was omitted in earlier episodes but this arc's been going on for so long that I've probably just forgotten lol

I expected the episode to be largely carried by its direction and art but then Tu just busted out three straight minutes of key animation for the Blazing Dragon Drum sequence. Based on the preview my kneejerk reaction to the possibility of Shida handling the Bajrang Gun finisher is...disappointment? He's done Luffy finishers before and he's so idiosyncratic as an animator that you already know what you're going to get just from seeing his name attached to something. I was hoping for Kojima or some other big name heavyweight from outside the usual One Piece crew to handle it. We'll see, maybe there's more to come. Kaido's flashback should definitely be more than an afterthought this time!

The real reason why Orochi had a Devil Fruit that gave him eight heads was because he needed that many mouths to handle all the scenery his voice actor chewed.

Title: ''Twenty Years of Prayer! Take Back the Land of Wano!''
Chapters Covered: 1048
Episode Director: Yasunori Koyama
Animation Director: Masahiro Kitazaki + Yong-ce Tu
Watch It: www.crunchyroll.com/one-piece

@karubiDON said in 1074: ''Believe in Momo - Luffy's Final Move!'':

Did anyone notice the ドン！！ impact frame when Luffy grabbed the clouds?? Amazing sequence!!

There's one point where the lightning forms the Norse runes for "hope" as well.

I think I appreciate the opening more after giving it a few more listens and catching on to the fact that the song is about Luffy and Momonosuke's relationship and how it's framed - a chunk of the footage is from Momonosuke's POV and his face is pointedly not shown until the very end. I think if maybe ten seconds or so were shaved off of the montage at the beginning or the O was larger so you could see the footage more clearly (I suspect it's the size it is to account for subtitles and closed captions) that would be perfect, because the actual new footage is lovely and the montage of episode clips at the end feels like a tribute to all the hard work the staff has done over the past four (!) years.

In the episode itself I still can't get over how creative and cool that cut of Luffy turning that bolt of lightning into a glowing blue bouncing rubberband is - it's a perfect example of fully taking advantage of a different medium to elevate the source material (Luffy just spun around it like it was a pole in the manga) and illustrate just how wild Luffy's awakened rubberization power is. Even if I don't like some of the lore behind it stuff like that justifies Gear Fifth's existence to me.

I also have to give props to Tessho Genda's acting during Kaido's monologue about Haki trumping all. You can almost taste the sour grapes oozing out of his mouth there.

The opening does an okay job of being a well-deserved victory lap for the Wano adaptation...once the actual footage starts to play. The last minute's fun, it actually feels more like an animated music video than an actual anime opening if that makes sense with how fast it moves and how packed the visuals are. Kind of spoil-ly too, but again the images go by so quickly the average viewer won't notice them all right away. But yeah, the expectation is that "Highest Peak" is only going to stick around for the remainder of the year with how it's set up.

The episode was great once we got past the obligatory "Momo has low self-confidence" sequence. That was an absolute masterclass in action storyboarding and animation, words fail me beyond that. The final sequence with the sky boats and Hyogoro's monologue was also expertly handled. Michibata is absolutely proving herself as one of the show's most top-tier directors.

So first off, after discussing the matter with Cinder, going forward we aren't going to be allowing links to unofficial episode streams in these threads. It's a similiar model to how we generally don't put up official discussion threads for new manga chapters until the Viz release drops each Sunday even though scans and translations are already floating around by then. Anyone who wants to find unofficial streams already knows where to look, I'm sure. Anyone who watches the episode prior to the Crunchyroll drop/dissemination is free to comment as always, but I'll be removing any actual pirate links. It's the sort of thing that has unfortunately gotten us into trouble in the past and we're acting out of an abundance of caution.

Now, onto the fun stuff:

Title: ''Believe in Momo - Luffy's Final Move!''
Chapters Covered: 1047
Episode Director: Nanami Michibata
Animation Director: Kazuya Hisada + Sota Shigetsugu (AD debut) + Shu Sugita (AD debut)
Watch It: www.crunchyroll.com/one-piece

Shigetsugu is credited on One Piece under the pen name of "HONE Hone". You might remember such sequences as Luffy vs. the Numbers and Luffy punching Kaido - Take #Whatever; he did them, and seems to be an action AD on this episode similar to what Yong-ce Tu does.

On top of that Opening 25 "Highest Point" by the band Owari no Sekai is debuting tonight and it's directed by the one-and-only Megumi Ishitani.

TBH I'm fine with this episode being a cooldown one production-wise, even if the circumstances covered in this episode are hamfisted and I'm as impatient as everyone else to get to the climax. The timing for the recap's obviously frustrating given that we just had one but I guess the three-week streak coincides with what the manga's been doing since Oda's hospitalization during Dressrosa and I'm sure there isn't a single anime production in the industry right now that wouldn't kill for the luxury of being able to have non-disruptive breaks every so often like One Piece anime can.

Aside from the lightning and water effects the animation wasn't anything to write home about but I liked (what I presume to be) Mamoru Yokota's AD style - very obvious, glossy Shida-like highlights and shadows. He's apparently been doing character design and animation director work in the industry for a good long while and he apparently worked on Stampede and RED and did some assistant AD work on a few episodes in the 1050s so there's his pre-existing connection to the team.