User blog comment:Kaido King of the Beasts/Best and Worst Openings/@comment-34981281-20150819161432

Ah. What a nice day. Oh, hello there. Good to see you. Yes, I did get a little worked up earlier about, eh... that opening. for now we'll just call it ______. But I also want to express that I have a positive side, so let me run this one by you.

"Fight Together" is the most beautiful One Piece opening there ever could have been. Please consider my theory.

I want to look at this literally piece-by-piece. The first things we see are Roger, Shanks, Kid Luffy, and then Luffy. They summed up the first chapter of One Piece in less than 2 seconds, and the music hasn't even really started yet. What's more is that every one of those pictures was giving actual effort and care, but more on that later.

The intro begins. This is a great way to build up excitement. We're being introduced to the instruments one at a time, really pumping us up before the singing starts. And we get some nice silouettes of the crew. But they aren't even just silouettes. They all have constantly moving walk cycles, and character-specific animation. They've got a cool, moving gradient effect, and they're in front of a fully-animated Earth with a fully-animated Sunny. No corners were cut, not even in the first 16 seconds. Compare this to ______, which literally opens with the chorus. There's no intro or build up, it's just "SHINING RUNNING FOREVER" out of nowhere.

As the title screen comes up in ______, we see brightly colored renders of the Straw Hats between moved around the screen. In Fight Together, we get this solemn image of the Sunny alone at Sabaody, with the subtle movement of bubbles around it. Cut to the straw hat, retired on Rusukaina. Look at the lighting in these two shots. It's got this dark, green-blue tint, which continues as we see Luffy, our protagonist, solemnly considering the weight of the situation. We know what's going on in his head, because the visuals tell us. We see his flashbacks of Marineford, Ace dying before him. And we see Luffy holding Reyleigh's vivre card, the key to reuniting with his long-lost crew. This isn't just to look pretty, this is actually giving us an in-depth look at where we are in the One Piece story.

The camera cleverly pans up at the line "fly to the light", demonstating how the visuals work with the music. And now we get individual animations of all of the Straw Hat crew training on their islands. I want to compare this scene to the scene in ______ at roughly the same timestamp. In ______, Luffy, Usopp, and Chopper chase around a golden stag as they run past their entire crew. In Fight Together, the characters have dynamic animation. They start either close or far from the camera, and switch by the end of their shot. In ______, they stay in the exact same spot, which is away from the camera without any perspective or focus. Pause while Brook is spinning in ______. They just blurred him to make a cartoonish 'spinning' vibe. Now pause Brook spinning in Fight Together. You can still see his entire face in full detail. His spin is actually timed, and he gets closer to the camera as he goes.

Next visual we see in Fight Together is a shot of Ace, Sabo, and Luffy as kids. This covers the episodes that will be present during the run of this opening. But it doesn't just show "these are the characters, this is the setting". We start at a wide shot, going as far as to show little Luffy tripping on the rocks. Our characters run towards the sunset and collapse into a big hug. The camera circles around them as they appear to have an entire conversation through facial expressions. It captures the heart of the episodes and the nature of each character. And most importantly, the lighting. Look at the lighting. The backgrounds were painted with a setting-sun orange glow. The characters themselves have been drawn with an orange tint. It's dynamic lighting, and like everything 'dynamic', it's not present in ______.

Let's see how ______ covers it's episodes; the Dressrosa arc. Well, we get a shot of the colleseum- Oh wait, now it's Lucy- Oh, now it's Bellam- Oops, Cavendish- Rebecc- Chinj- Bartol- Law... Well, they spent about a fraction of a fraction of a second on each shot. But then, THEN they actually hold a shot. And it's Franky Tank and Thunder Soldier eating popcorn. This was the shot that they let go on for an entire second. That and Robin being groped by Dwarves. I guess flashing cool characters that you'll never see again does actually capture the spirit of Dressrosa, nyuck nyuck nyuck.

Now we're to the best part in Fight Together. The part that broke me down to tears when I first saw it. The music goes to a sudden bridge (there's no bridge in ______ unless you count the long-nose Blackbeard intermission), and the lighting suddenly shifts. We, as an audience, now know the tone has changed. And we're greeted by HD re-animations of how each Straw Hat joined the crew. They could have just shown it, but they go the extra mile. They split it into three parts and show each at the same time. 1. a wide-shot of the whole scene. 2. close-up of the Straw Hat in question. 3. close-up of Luffy. All pieces are united, and I swear. You can pause on any frame here and it will still be completely on-model and beautiful. I'd compare it to ______ right now, but that's it. There's nothing to compare it to. No other opening has a segment quite like this one.

"The sun will rise", the lyrics say as the sun rises on Luffy, back were we left him, in front of the hat. And as the bright light of the sun encompasses him, the ghost of Ace appears to push him forward towards his dreams. Sudden wide-shot to reveal that Luffy is all alone. They know just how long to hold every shot to leave the biggest impact. It's all done tastefully and in the true spirit of One Piece. Then Luffy picks up his hat and places it on his head with a smile.

He starts walking down a road while the faces of his lost crewmates pan passed the camera. His walk becomes a jog, then a sprint, when at the very end of the road, he arrives at his friends at the Thousand Sunny, and they all celebrate. Final shot of the opening: the crew, back-turned to the camera, ready to set sail. "We fight together!" Cue applause. Now how does ______ end again? "WE ARE ZE ONE, GO 'HEAD!!" "15TH ANNIVERSARY" while the Straw Hats pose in there dumbass costumes. Look at Luffy's leg. Look at Nami's boobs. Look at the black void where Sanji's face should be. And there they are, sitting on top of a pile of gold. Now which is better? Fight Together, with memories and friendship? Or ______, with pirate booty?