I’m not usually one to complain about art and animation but I was sincerely hoping the Kuzan and Doflamingo confrontation would look fantastic and, as I was crossing my fingers, I was instantly hit with a zoomed out shot of no detail, some pretty poor art and animation in general, and reaction shots that went on far too long. Yet, even with all of those problems, the scene was still super gripping. In fact, checking the manga, I think the tension built up with the reaction shots is good, it just went on too long, as the manga has this moment go by far quicker. I went in expecting it to be a disengaging situation, not a fight. But when Doflamingo refused to back down and was frozen and then faced Kuzan and started to approach him, I had to hold my breath. All of which made for the unflinching Kuzan as Doflamingo walked past him obscenely chilling. It was a moment of two of the worlds super powers getting inches away from each other and I liked that.
Further, the scene continued on to reveal a ton about Kuzan and it gave us one beautiful interaction he had with Smoker. First of all, Doflamingo and Smoker were right to question Kuzan’s role in all of this, the only way he should have known to come save Smoker would be if he was connected to the underworld in some way. That way is unclear, but he’s even ahead of the navy when it comes to Doflamingo and wants Akainu and the others to be alerted because Doflamingo could be the biggest threat they’ve dealt with since he took charge. He’s looking out for what he believes in but like he said, the navy isn’t everything, once you leave there are things you can see and do that you couldn’t otherwise. To have Smoker show a moment of doubt when it came to Kuzan as they sat there, separated from everyone else in the snow, as Smoker is bandaged up, and for Kuzan to reply one simple thing “I’m still me, Smoker” felt beautiful and delicate. That was all Smoker needed to hear to trust him. That he may be aligned differently now but he’s still the guy Smoker knew.
As for the Straw Hats, the discussion of Kaido and Dressrosa ended up revealing more about Kin’emon. Him and Momonosuke showed some serious shock when it came to hearing about Kaido and further, they want to go to Dressrosa because their comrade is imprisoned there. These two may have some deeply linked goals to the rest of the group. As Law stated, the goal is as expected, to weaken Kaido’s forces to ultimately strike him and to do so they must begin with the man made devil fruit. By striking the arms dealer Kaido uses, he loses the ability to increase his army, and so the next stop is a manufacturing plant on Dressrosa, the specific territory of Doflamingo too. Interestingly, there was a line of dialogue over the man made fruit being Caesar simply putting Vegapunk’s “lineage factor” into principle which goes to help the little idea we had of Momonosuke eating a Vegapunk made fruit. The weaknesses of them could simply be as we see with Momonosuke, them being hard to control. Another little thing is that for the past two episodes we got a glimpse at Usopp working on the Clima Tact which makes me eager to see if he’s upgrading it…
The end of the episode was a fun little montage. Giant hail started falling and we had a big team effort to escape it, I only just noticed here that Nami is actually wearing a shirt, and then we had Momonosuke getting close to the ladies of the crew. Him being a little pervert is charming in the sense that it’s another way he takes after his dad, although I did find the jokes about him abusing his child status a bit played out. And finally, ever since we heard a Wano Samurai would be here I had been hoping that he’d recognize Zoro’s sword and that finally happened!!! It was brief but we got something, Kin’emon thought Zoro had robbed the grave of “the Wano Kingdom’s hero”. Ryuma was in fact a legendary hero so it’s no surprise Zoro knew of him at the time of their duel. |