One Piece: The Desert Princess and the Pirates
DVD Review of Adventures in Alabasta movie from FUNimation
Anime based on manga tend to drag on to prevent the television series from overlapping the comic book. Movies based on that manga have better animation, but their original story can’t disrupt the manga’s continuity either. Why not do a movie version of a manga storyline that trims the anime’s fat while boosting its visuals?
One Piece - The Desert Princess and The Pirates: Adventures in Alabasta takes this route. The eighth One Piece movie released in Japan but the first that distributer FUNimation brought to the U.S., the film shortens the manga’s Alabasta arc into a single 90-minute dose. However, cutting over 50 issues of manga down to a feature length doesn’t come without consequences.
Pirate Adventures
The movie skimps on the series’ backstory, which is common in anime movies. Young Monkey D. Luffy is on a quest to become the King of the Pirates, crossing the Grand Line and getting into bloody battles with over-the-top villains along the way. Luffy is also one of many pirates who at the Devil Fruit, which gives the person special powers (stretching in Luffy’s case) at the cost of the ability to swim.
Luffy and his diverse team of crewmates travel to the desert kingdom of Alabasta with the king’s daughter, Princess Vivi. The pirate-turned-public-hero Crocodile has been manipulating factions into civil war, and only Luffy and Vivi can stop him. Luffy has the determination to beat Crocodile – if only Crocodile’s sand powers didn’t make him virtually invulnerable.
The Cutting Room Floor
To scale the arc down to a manageable size a number of subplots were removed. Navy captain Smoker, Luffy’s brother Ace, and Crocodile’s casino hideout are nowhere in sight, as are references to the arcs leading up to Alabasta.
The cost of removing these scenes is that for most of the movie it feels like watching the Cliff Note’s version of the storyline: The viewer learns the plot, but it doesn't flow well and some of the fun and energy is sucked out of it. Of the cutdowns the shortened flashbacks to Vivi’s childhood work the best, getting the information from them down to its bare essentials.
Characters
As the subtitle suggests, Vivi becomes the central character and has the most backstory. Her will is as strong as Luffy’s even if she rarely fights. The idealism of Luffy and other supporting characters and the pure evil of Crocodile also follow series’s norms. With abilities that range from a transforming deer to hands that can grow out of anything, watching these characters fight is fun and different from the "biggest blast wins" mentality of other manga.
Luffy’s crewmates suffer the most from scene cutting. Subplots like Nami figuring out how to use her new weapon in a fight with Crocodile's minon were removed and take out, taking out a lot of the context and charactization in the process. Ship cook Sanji’s battle with the flamboyant Mr. 2 Bon Clay fares the best, but even that feels rushed. This also leads to some confusion: In Nami's fight her spike-powered opponent suddenly grows giant muscles, which is explained in the manga but not the movie.
Visuals and the Audience
As expected from a movie, the colors are sharper and character designs are more detailed than the television version. CGI is also used for effects like Crocodile’s sand powers and mesh well with the animation. The movie also uses dramatically illustrated stills at key plot points.
As a series entry point The Desert Princess is a good overview of a major arc and the series in general, with much of the action intact if not as smooth a ride as it could have been. Otherwise there’s not much to see other than a prettier version of the Luffy-Crocodile fight and seeing how FUNimation handled its new uncensored English dub.
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