User blog:GearFifth/How good is Stampede?

One Piece: Stampede
One Piece: Stampede is the 14th One Piece movie directed by Takashi Otsuka. It stars Mayumi Tanaka, Kazuya Nakai, Akemi Okamura, Kappei Yamaguchi, Hiroaki Hirata, Ikue Ōtani, Yuriko Yamaguchi, Kazuki Yao and Chō. The movie takes place sometime after the events of the Whole Cake Island arc (we can deduce this from Luffy's bounty of 1.5 Billion), however the straw hats are depicted as being fully united. Stampede is a filler movie that contains canon elements, similar to Strong World.

The pirates of the world set sail for the great Pirate Festival, where they must compete in a no-rule race to obtain "Roger's Treasure".

The movie kicks off with the Straw Hats arriving at the Pirate Festival, with the 2 villains of the movie introduced in the first 2 scenes - Douglas Bullet and Buena Festa. Overall, this movie is definitely a fast-paced, action-packed experience, since the last hour and 10 minutes of the movie are just non-stop fighting. However, in my opinion that is one of its main flaws. The first half hour of the movie or so is considerably slow-paced compared to the rest of the movie. This is where the pirates are still racing to obtain Roger's Treasure, however once Bullet obtains it, the movie takes an important turn. It's safe to say that we can split Stampede into 2 sections - The Race for Roger's Treasure and The Battle Against Bullet. The battle against Bullet takes up the majourity of the movie, with the worst generation attempting to hold him off. Bullet is portrayed in the movie to be an unimaginably strong person, and so it's no easy task for the worst generation. The non-stop battle continues up until the very end of the movie, where the Straw Hats have defeated Bullet and are now trying to escape from the Buster Call - the early dramatic hook of the movie. In my opinion, this is the biggest flaw of the movie.

The majourity of the movie is just fighting with no stops and no time to properly focus on the characters or the storyline and rather just being fed with one action-packed sequence after another. The movie structure was heavily lacking, and was very predictable at times since the movie isn't really about focusing on story, more just focusing on crazy battles that hype the audience up. The main source of hype in the movie were the amazing, quick character entrances and the plot twists. Since this movie takes place in the world Pirate Festival, many more characters are included in the movie than in a normal One Piece movie and so it contains many fast character entrances. The main plot twists of the movie happened in the beginning and end of the movie: The announcement of the Buster Call, The eternal pose to Laugh Tale, Luffy crushing the eternal pose in front of everyone. These scenes were animated exceptionally well. However, this isn't all Stampede has. In my opinion, Stampede has one more star scene that stole the entire movie for me: Usopp protecting Luffy in the fire with Memories playing in the background. This was wonderfully animated and Usopp's VA, Kappei Yamaguchi, did an amazing job in this scene. Best of all, the background implementation of Memories was amazingly edited in and it fit the scene outstandingly well, allowing everything to come together to make the perfect scene and in my opinion, the best scene of the entire movie. The animation, the music, the voice acting, the moment of the story - all of these make this scene as good as it is.

In my opinion, the 2 star voice actors of this movie were Mayumi Tanaka and Kappei Yamaguchi. The music was amazingly implemented into the best moments with top-tier animation to complement it. Since this movie has many memorable and epic moments but fails to have a good structure/storyline, I give One Piece: Stampede a 7/10.