One Piece: Episode of Sorajima

Includes spoiler, but idk why you would be watching this movie without watching the original first

Toei does a bang up job on ruining the source material, somehow in 2018 they managed to make the animation worse than it did 10+ years ago, the major fights within the arc ,including chopper, zoro, and luffy getting literally 1 still image of them defeating there opponents, or the animation was awful. the final attack that finished the arc 10+ years ago(Luffy punching Eneru into the bell) had so much weight and impact, but this movie made it look very choppy and had way less frames of animation.

Making a 1 hour 40 minutes long movie out of 44 episodes long anime arc might look good on paper, but... oh wait, it looks terrible on paper and comes off exactly as soulless and empty as one could fear.

Exactly 6 years ago today, the "Episode of" movie series for One Piece started with Nami's past story. Some of these episodes (movies) were totally worth of watching and managed to be partly better than the original tv series. Sorajima (or Skypiea like it's know in English) mainly further shows that Toie is on a slope. Digimon movies and Dragon Ball Super were clearly not enough ... to stain their nonexistent reputation, so naturally, they are now offering the same with One Piece. Gj.

I imagine this thing was structured by making a list of scenes that should be here, and then they were edited together. Whatever should have been there in-between those scenes to create tension, work as a build-up and make the movie have a solid pacing -- is not there. They did attempt to capture some of that with cheap narration of what occurred, but "eh" is pretty much the word I found myself saying when witnessing that. This thing really don't even seem like a continuous movie but rather an animated memo.

At least some improvement exists. Nami's boobs are way bigger than in the original and Nico Robin's Rack is so enormous I wouldn't even dare to write it without a capital letter. Priorities were clearly in all the right places when this was planned.

One Piece has been criticized for its ridiculously slow tempo/pace, but rushing things in this manner somehow made the thing way worse and so boring that it was mainly a waste of time and only managed to make the arc seem exponentially worse than it originally was.

This is the first time I have ever had to just drop something One Piece related. Look, I wasn't a huge fan of the Skypiea arc to begin with, but this 'Episode of:' was just terrible and god-awful boring. I could only sit through half of it before giving up.

Condensing an arc THAT big into such a limited time can be difficult, so I understand needing to be a bit choppy, but this was over the top. Watching this felt less like watching a story/arc, and more like looking at a check list of things that happened. That is completely boring to watch, and ... seems kind of pointless even bothering to make this if its impossible to get any kind of entertainment out of it since all you're getting are the facts. It was incredibly choppy covering main events (which were therefore not well explained, some points not being explained at all, it was like getting the answer to a mystery no one told me about), and therefore the narrative was all over the place.

Time management was shoddy, they spent a long time focusing on the background of the current story, and therefore didn't have enough time to adapt the actual CURRENT story. Furthermore, they didn't even bother to animate the entire background scene- they literally just took a huge clip from the original anime and put it in, again making me wonder what the point of making this was.

Look, if you've seen/read One Piece and you enjoy watching these reanimation stuff, dont bother watching this. There is absolutely no entertainment value, they didn't even keep in the best parts of the arc- the jokes. Recaps can still be entertaining; this one really wasn't. And if you haven't seen One Piece before- or you currently are and just wanted to skip all the episodes for the Skypiea arc (its an essential arc so I wouldn't skip it anyway), just go read a synopsis of what happens in it- you get the same exact amount of information without having to sit through a near 2 hour long 'Episode of:'.

Tl;Dr: There is no story, only an animated list. Art half the time was old animation. Sounds are the usual old music. There were no time for characters to be themselves. Got absolutely no enjoyment from it seeing as they purposely took out anything that can be enjoyed from it (it even lacks a sense of nostalgia). Overall, you'll get more from reading a wiki page of this arc than you will from this.