Review of One Piece Film: Z (2012) by Wailun L — 12 Feb 2014

Best of the One Piece movie series so far, and possibly the single most inspiring anime this year, One Piece Z portrays the collision between the ending of a legend and the beginning of another. This movie, with OP's usual medley of devil fruits, legendary figures and riveting plots, is certainly a grand feast for OP fans anticipating another melodramatic war. However, what this particular movie distinguishes itself among the hodgepodge of anime is really its exploration of deep human feelings.

Too often do people impulsively deem anime as nothing more than fantasy or delusion. In their subconscious, there exists a notion that anime is for the weak-minded, those who resort to unreal stories to satisfy real emotion need. Indeed, this notion perhaps stands true in most cases in that anime never seems to teach us much beyond the screen; it merely gives us a primordial desire to join that world full of "coincidences" and "magic". In the past OP series, all we anticipate is for Luffy to defeat his enemies, whatever their wicked causes are. We watch the movies as pure consumers, eager to be excited and exploited. However, never do we truly view OP as a odyssey of a man's struggle for dream or a pursuit for freedom. Anime is and always will remain anime as long as we think it is anime.

However, One Piece Z challenges this relation and drags us one layer deeper. Through soliloquy and dialogue, we're forced to reconsider the definition of justice and evil in a new light. How much justice is still justice? How little evil becomes evil? For Z, his past was embroiled in the fight against evil, whereas his present, even after so much trauma, is still about eradicating pirates. Perhaps people's dream never dies. As time proceeds, it just manifests itself in a different manner. Like William Faulkner wrote, "the past is never dead. In fact, it's not even past" : what we're doing now is entirely based upon what we've done so far. In addition, Z's experience to some extent might be drawn from that of Dent in the Dark Knight, who also suffers from the same conversion from what we consider general good to unarguable bad.

However, as we zoom out of the details, we gradually grasp the essence of One Piece: who cares if one piece actually exists, it's the tangle behind it that makes One Piece OP.