This is the One Piece I love the most. There's something so calm and tender about this episode as things continue to go from bad to worse. We jump into the scene with Barrels' men searching for a wounded Corazón, who managed to slip away off screen. We see the blood stained in the snow and later we find his footprints as he stumbles his way back to our shivering Law. Through it all, Corazón has succeeded in holding on to the Op-Op Fruit, but at what cost? He shoves it down Law's throat and collapses from blood loss, still trying to pacify the poor kid who is frantically attempting to figure his new powers out to save his friend. “Just a flesh wound” and all that.
This is a really beautiful episode and it has almost nothing to do with flashy animation of any kind. This is an episode that really revels in both the size of the situation, and also the calmness at the heart of it. The soundtrack is all soft and sad, even when people are escaping from Barrels' burning castle and the camera is admiring the the gigantic naval fleet approaching the island. It's rare that saying an episode stays on-model feels like a compliment, but it's true here. I really like seeing these characters drawn in a way that feels “right,” and I'm sad that it so infrequently hits me as being noticeably on-point. Well, it definitely feels right this week, allowing the star of the show to be the pace and the framing of each situation as we learn piece by piece just how sad and hopeless everything is.
There's a point where everything looks like it's going to be okay, because of course there is. The Navy has arrived and little Law ventures out into the cold, hoping that there's somebody who can help Corazón (his Op-Op powers don't seem to have kicked in yet). We know Tsuru and her gang of tough-looking naval women have arrived for Doflamingo's head, and they seem like nice enough people. We also know that Corazón is secretly a marine, so this is a problem that should get smoothed out easy enough. But of course, this is a One Piece flashback.
The marine that Law receives help from, it turns out, is Doflamingo's own double agent, Vergo. Everything becomes unraveled at this moment as Vergo, and by extension the approaching Doflamingo, now knows the extent at which Corazón is a traitor of the crew. He wails on both of them, showing us the seed of the tense relationship we saw between Law and Vergo back on Punk Hazard.
But the real threat is Doflamingo himself, now harboring a deep anger and resentment for Cora and Law breaking his sacred sense of family. We've known from the get-go of this flashback that certain things were going to happen. We knew Law and Corazón would bond and knew Corazón would die by his brother's hand. In many cases it would be considered a story-telling no-no to make those things so obvious from the start, but it's brought the audience on a very unique emotional journey instead.
Corazón has been by far one of the most likable flashback characters in the series (which says a lot) and the thing that really drives this home is how he deals with the realization of his own demise. Even in this dark hour, he knows the most important things are to get Law to safety and do whatever he can to face the reality of his brother's villainy. “If you think of me someday,” he says to an unconscious Law, “I'd rather you remember my smile.” The fact that his big, toothy grin that punctuates the episode looks really dumb and goofy just makes the scene all the more poignant. There's a gross mixture of sadness and love and humility in the air.
Japanese studio to handle production slated for broadcast, streaming globally― Kadokawa and Singaporean game developer and publisher Garena announced on Monday that they are co-producing an anime adaptation of Garena's Garena Free Fire battle royale shooting game, with a Japanese studio handling the animation. Kadokawa's Kadokawa Qingyu subsidiary is the production manager. The anime is planned to b...
Healer Nanna's powers have one very unique caveat: she has to have sex with the person to heal them. See why Rebecca Silverman calls it "a cute story, decently racy, and generally good, fluffy fun."― One of the fun things about Seven Seas' Steamship line of racy manga aimed at a female audience is finding which romance tropes are prevalent in any given release. While every genre has its tropes and s...
What's the perfect recipe for waifu supremacy? Lucas and Nick look at fan-favorites from Yu Yu Hakusho to Spice & Wolf.― What's the perfect recipe for waifu supremacy? Lucas and Nick look at fan-favorites from Yu Yu Hakusho to Spice & Wolf. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.Spoiler Warning for discussion of the s...
Train to the End of the World and Voice Actor Radio are getting a lot of love these last few weeks! Discover which other series stand out in our weekly user rankings!― Let's have a look at what ANN readers consider the best (and worst) of the season,
based on the polls you can find in our Daily Streaming Reviews
and on the Your Score page with the latest simulcasts. Keep in mind that these rankings...
Crystal Kay previously sang themes for 2004's Fullmetal Alchemist and Nodame Cantabile― Recently, Anime News Network was able to sit down with singer-songwriter Crystal Kay and talk about not only her involvement with anime over the years but also what it was like to grow up in Japan as the child of a Korean-Japanese mother and an African-American father. Anime fans likely know of Crystal Kay throug...
The plot is excellent in the romance camp. Everything that happens is to get Eui-joon and Gunwoo together, and it works pretty well.― You can read The Dangerous Convenience Store in English two ways. The first is to read it on the manhwa site/app Manta, which has all seventy-five chapters and four bonus stories available. The second is to read Seven Seas' print (or ebook) edition, which, as of this ...
Some older mysteries inch closer to resolution as the true nature of the Abyss slowly comes into view, and long-posed questions start to be answered.― Sometimes, being a fan of Akihito Tsukushi's acclaimed Made in Abyss series means acclimating to suffering. Like many Western devotees, I was introduced to this bizarre, squishy, disturbing world via the 2017 first season of Kinema Citrus' fantastic a...
60th, final episode of previous anime streamed on YouTube on Friday― The official Twitter account for the anime of Penguin Box's Odekake Kozame (Little Shark's Outings) manga announced on Friday that the manga will get a new anime series. Update: The staff revealed a visual for the new series in a press release on Saturday. The previous anime series debuted on YouTube last August, and its 60th and f...
As Slam Dunk reached its final stretch, I can see why this series is considered the sports classic that it is today.― This is the largest batch of Slam Dunk episodes that I've reviewed thus far. Originally, I wanted to review the show in more even seasons, but given its overall pacing and release, it wasn't easy to find a moment where it felt right to stop and start again. However, as we approached ...