English Dub Review: One Piece Film: Red

2022 is a story of two anime movies. Earlier this year, Dragon Ball Super released Super Hero, and that movie was a dumpster fire. My buddy Ben thought differently, but I will die on this hill. However, One Piece Film: Red has become the sixth highest grossing anime movie of all time in Japan, destroying the box office Super Hero put out. It had 11 consecutive weeks at number 1. But does Red live up to the crushing hype that preceded it?

Since I started my journey into the One Piece fandom last year, I have consumed every single one of the 1,038 episodes and 1,061 chapters. In a short amount of time, I’ve gone through everything I can. What was the reason? Fucking god damn Red-Haired Shanks is finally getting his time to shine. Instead of getting the bullshit Ace treatment, and getting an artificial emotional attachment to a character that has next to zero screen time.

That’s the thing. Even though you know that Shanks is a bad ass motherfucker, you don’t know why. Red tries to answer that. We get story bits that fit. Why is Shanks’s bounty so high? Why wasn’t Uta around? Who is Uta? When did Shanks have time to get down and do the dirty with someone? There’s so much going on, and so many answers we needed. I’m not so sure we even got the answers we needed.

The first thing we need to go over is the character of Uta. While the movie is about as canon as Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, Uta herself apparently isn’t. If you’re current, or close to Wano, you know that Oda forced Shanks into the ending of Wano so that we can get that symbiotic advertising. Chapters 1054 and 1055 were basically just an ad for the movie, even though the events of the movie doesn’t affect it, nor do the events of Wano affect the movie. Ultimately, it created some real nebulous shit.

So, where does this all fit Uta? Well, One Piece pulled a Dragon Ball Super. The shitty part is that Uta was mentioned by name. So she’s canonically in One Piece. However, the problem is how does the events of Red affect everything? At current, it doesn’t. Then again, Oda changes his minds on a whim, so anything is possible. I think the integration of Uta was handled terribly, and turned the manga into a terribly placed ad, that will undoubtedly get edited to remove any mention of Uta.

That said, how does the film stand up in a vacuum? It’s honestly a mixed bag. Red executes a lot very well. I loved the introduction. The intro was designed to be a mix of a newscast and found film scenes. It shows what the war between the various pirate crews and the Marines has done to the world. It paints the picture quickly that the world needs an escape from the calamity and bullshit that the world has given the common folk of the One Piece world.

That leads into probably the second most impressive in the entire movie. The CG set piece of Uta’s concert mesh so well with the hand drawn Uta, and the hand drawn scenes with her audience blew the bullshit that was Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero‘s completely computer generated movie look like the dog shit it really was. There were so many instances during the beginning concert scene that has me slack-jawed. One Piece is a vibrant show, but Red absolutely nails it. The CG sequences absolutely nail this and drive it home.

At this point, we’re brought back to Earth, and Luffy is doing Luffy things. We get our first look at the crew, in their cleverly designed concert gear. I’ve got to say, this was fucking great. Everything from Luffy in a band shirt and Ussop in fake KISS gear and face paint looked so god damn good. However, as I said, Luffy has about as much tact as a nuclear warhead detonating. He goes down to the stage, and almost gets everyone to leave. However, that’s when the shit hit the fan. She just goes off the rails. Uta ends up being the murderous, obsessed girlfriend that Luffy probably doesn’t want.

And that’s where the bullshit starts to flow. The movie is named Red. The promotional material is all about getting Shanks into the action, and the movie is all about him. Then we get closer, and the material starts to shift. We get Uta, and I just started to get this feeling that Shanks is playing second fiddle to a non-canon character. And that’s what happens.

Shanks doesn’t show up in the film until Uta is about to stab Luffy and kill him. He shows up just in time for Uta to transform into the demon, Tot Musica. There will be more on this later. However, most of Shanks’s time on screen is through narrator distorted flashbacks. During the time, we get the “official” story where Shanks just levels Elegia, tricks Uta into staying there, and leaves with everything. Later on, we get the truth where it was Uta who killed everyone. Shanks helped stop her, and told Gordon (more on this idiot later) to protect her and teach her to be the best singer she can possibly be. We’re supposed to give a shit about a character who you know will serve the same purpose as the crew of Star Wars: Rogue One: to die.

The flashbacks serve two functions. One, it shows how Shanks got such a gigantic bounty on his head. Two, it shows how Uta wasn’t around. Gordon did exactly what Shanks wanted him to do, and protect her from the truth. She didn’t know the truth until she found a transponder snail from that night. One thing it doesn’t show, however, is why the fuck does Luffy not mention her at all? She’s supposed to be the musician of the Red Haired Pirates from before episode one and chapter one. Why in the fuck is her backstory that she’s friends with Luffy We’re supposed to give a shit about a character who you know will serve the same purpose as the crew of Star Wars: Rogue One: to die.

Another thing is her lineage. We were led to assume that she was legitimately Shanks’s daughter. Like, biblically, she was his daughter. Shanks fucked a woman, and nine months later, she showed up. Instead, she showed up in a treasure chest, like he did with Gol D. Roger. this was fucking stupid. We couldn’t get what actually made sense, and another person is the hypothetical child of a pirate. You know it’s a fucking trope when the only characters in One Piece that actually have a canonical father are Ace, Luffy, Sanji, and Ussop. Big Mom’s family doesn’t count, because I’m convinced her family tree is a straight line at this point.

Why was her power kept so nebulous? Through the entire movie, you are given hints that her power is one thing, then they insinuate they’re different, to it ends up being an amalgamation of all of the powers. She has the ability to put people to sleep, put them in a dream world where anything is possible, and no one knows. Then, there’s the final power, where she’s able to control her victims like puppets. The only drawback is that the power fails when she sleeps. However, if she dies when people are in this fake world, these victims’s souls are stuck in that sleep world and dead.

The end of the movie draws everything together. Uta is about to reach the end of her plan, and just exhaust herself right to death from eating wake mushrooms. That’s where she decided to enact her final plan, and to perform “Tot Musica”, and bring out the song’s namesake. This was, by far, the most impressive sequence in the movie, and made me sit in amazement. Everything in this sequence was just straight fire. Uta losing control and starting to sing the song to bring Tot Musica is pure magic. I was sitting there, listing to this amazing song, and you see this giant monster just take shape.

The fighting on both ends is a mess, until things finally mess when Ussop and Yassop coordinated their Observation Haki, to pull this overly convoluted plan all together. As convoluted as this plan was, the coordinated attack was so out of left field, and it worked perfectly. The sequence to get to Uta inside Tot Musica was so well animated, and the CG sequencing melded in with hand drawn animation of the characters just going all out trying to find a way to win. Most of these characters only know how to win.

The stand out moment is the world going to shit around them, but Uta in Tot Musica, and Luffy in base form just standing there was so different. Generally in Shonen movies and shows, the final battle starts, and the main character and antagonist just go ham from the start. Watching this, I got vibes from when WALTER and Sheamus had their stare down while their teams just beat the shit out of each other in the same ring.

Our parade of cameos did their thing. Law, Beppo, Brulee, Kakakuri, Oven, Bartolomeo, Cody, Helmeppo, and a bunch of Marines make their non-canon movie trope cameo, and it made as much sense as the cameos in Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero. There is one thing that needs to be said, however. Chibi Beppo is the fucking MVP of these cameos.

The end of the fight was absolute insanity, and I was for it. The art direction was something that needs to be taken into account here. You’ve never seen Shanks’s power in full force. Also, this is the first time you see animated Gear 5…kind of. The final attack goes from the crisp animation, devolves to what amounts to a bi-colored, animated sketch for both Shanks’s signature attack and Luffy’s Gear 5. I was honestly impressed with the final fight. It was so crisp, and looked so fucking good.

I think now is a good time to talk about the soundtrack. Every song was so well performed. Ado, who’s the singing voice of Uta, nails every song. There’s actual passion, which is something that a lot of anime soundtracks are kind of mailed in. Ado’s performance of “Tot Musica” was an absolute banger of a song. I’ll link that at the end of the review. This is easily the best song from an anime soundtrack in a few decades. “Tot Musica” is evil.

There is one thing that made me chuckle. In the One Piece world, you’d think the pirates are the evil of the world if you listened to the Marines. However, just like in the main canon, the Marines are really fucking evil. They’re the totalitarian group akin to those people with the red hats. They don’t give a shit about people, they just care about “justice.”

The actual end of the movie made very little sense, and left way too much up in the air. Uta declined to take the meds that would have put her the fuck out, and everyone gets back to the real world. Then, she sits with Shanks and the rest of her crew, standing vigil over Luffy’s comatose body. Then she passes out, assuming that she died from exhaustion. But did she? She wasn’t explicitly shown dying, and there wasn’t a clear shot of any sort of coffin or anything on Shanks’s ship. Everything was left nebulous, just in case Oda decides he wants Uta in the main story in a real capacity.

Overall, there is so much to take in. There’s a lot that was done so well. Any time there was a CG set piece, like the concert and final battle, the animation stepped up huge. I could watch those scenes on loop. The movie doesn’t quite live up to the hype, because the expectations of what I wanted Red to be didn’t get matched. The narrative just fell apart, and was nothing but a flimsy excuse to patch holes we needed filled in Shanks’s backstory.

This was not it. However, the animation and action sequences absolutely make it work watching. I can equate how I feel about Red to what I initially felt about the first Avengers film. The story was a dumpster fire, but the action carried the movie across the finish line. Ultimately, I was satisfied with the movie, because I was entertained. But if I was expecting an insane amount of worldbuilding that I expect from the manga and show, I’m not getting it. But that action made it worth while.

Scoring this is easy. When you factor in the canon of One Piece, and how it was flimsily put into the canon of the manga, this falls apart. However, In a vacuum, One Piece Film: Red checks a lot of boxes.