ANIME

DVD REVIEW . One Piece - The Desert Princess and the Pirates: Adventures in Alabasta

Before we start, I must confess that I am not a One Piece fan. My only prior experience with the series was an ever so brief glimpse of the show on Fox’s Saturday Morning Fob X (yah, I know the real name, but that’s what the logo looked like) and a Playstation 2 video game demo that came with a magazine. The game was fun, a 3-D free-movement fighter like Powerstone, but left me no insight into the world of One Piece.

So, to find out more about One Piece I hit the Wiki. Apparently One Piece is a series about a group of pirates, called the Straw Hat Pirates, lead by a stretchy boy named Monkey D. Luffy, who holds aspirations of becoming the king of all pirates. One Piece - The Desert Princess and the Pirates: Adventures in Alabasta is the eighth One Piece movie, which happen to be released yearly in Japan. According to the Wiki entry, this was the number 2 highest grossing picture the weekend it was released, and the 26th highest grossing picture of the year. Not bad for the eighth film in a series.

But for the uninitiated, that’s pretty much where the interest ends. The Desert Princess and the Pirates is actually a retelling/recap of a series of episodes called the Alabasta chronicles, concerning a young princess named Vivi, a friend to the Straw Hat Pirates, attempting to reclaim her desert kingdom, Alabasta, from an evil pirate named Crocodile. Alabasta used to be a thriving city until Crocodile came and stole its water through false heroics….or something. This film, being a Cliffs’ Notes version of a lengthy set of episodes, themselves building upon multiple seasons of television back-story, spends little to no time developing the actual narrative, characters, or their motivations for action. Instead the audience is treated to 70 minutes of non-stop fighting, with 10 minute buffers on either end for foundation, falling action, credits and the like. Undoubtedly this is all fine for fans of the show, as they have had time to get to know the characters already and are simply looking for some high-octane action and dazzling visuals, but for complete newcomers it will prove tiresome. In fact, with The Desert Princess and the Pirates it took me about five attempts before I finally made it through the movie.

While the story served to alienate me, it was nothing compared to the actual look of the film. There’s this demented quality about the One Piece character designs that I found mildly disturbing. Faces are a mess of baseball sized eyes and grapefruit-chomping mouths fit into normal facial spaces. Everyone is drawn in an extremely lanky fashion, seemingly stretched on the rack for days before being allowed to adventure for pirate gold. For men, hands are often far larger than their heads, which sit like small almonds in the middle of a vast expanse of shoulders. Women, on the other hand, seem modeled after toothpick and gumdrop combinations, with six inch waists, 40-inch busts, and again, the slightest pittance of cranial space. Don’t even get me started on the Cyrano man, the butch dominatrix, the mice with antlers, or the ducks with teeth. It all makes the sketchbook drawings of Napoleon Dynamite look positively refined in comparison.

But character designs and story aside, there is a fairly fluid quality to the animation. One Piece - The Desert Princess and the Pirates is technically very polished. In fact, there are a couple of sequences (including a fight between Luffy and Crocodile toward the end) that actually made me forget the crude drawings and lacking story with their visual panache. It wasn’t enough to save the film for me, but at least it was something.

So, in closing, One Piece - The Desert Princess and the Pirates: Adventures in Alabasta will probably please fans of One Piece, and to them I would heartily recommend this film. All others should stay far away.

The DVD.

Despite my dislike of the film, Funimation’s transfer is pretty awesome. The film is presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and is bright and crisp as their usual standard. The film comes with your choice of an English dub or the original Japanese languge track with subtitles. Of these I found the Japanese track to be a little more entertaining, what with its somewhat politically incorrect dialog and better voice acting. The English track had a bit too much shrieking for me.

In terms of extras, the DVD is exceedingly light. I would have liked to see some background specials on the making of the film, or possibly even the fan-base of the show, but only found the usual Funimation trailer gallery, which didn’t even include the theatrical trailer for this One Piece Movie.

All in all, Funimation’s DVD of One Piece - The Desert Princess and the Pirates: Adventures in Alabasta is fairly okay. The lack of extras might underwhelm One Piece fans, but I’m sure they’ll like the film. Older anime fans should steer clear of the disc, as the film will leave them questioning the tastes of today’s youngsters.

About the Author

Chris Nelson has been an off and on anime fan since the days of Streamline Pictures. A former film and English major, he is now a Software Engineer and contract Technical Writer living in the Silicon Valley.