One Piece film offers great animation, story

Lillian Thomason

Over the weekend, I saw the newest One Piece movie, “Film: Red.” I loved it.

The movie was released on Nov. 4. The animation was amazing, and the plot was even better.

In the beginning, we see Uta (one of the main characters and Shanks’s adopted daughter). She was doing a singing concert with millions of people.

The main characters of the actual One Piece series: Luffy, Nami, Zoro, Usopp, Chopper, Sanji, Franky, Brook, and Jinbe, are seen cheering Uta on in the crowd. Luffy goes up to Uta, and Uta remembers Luffy from their childhood. They start talking, and Luffy tells Uta he’s a pirate. Uta does not agree with this, as her goal is to stop the Pirate Age since she feels it’s just filled with violence and hurt.

She feels this way from Shanks burning down a whole island and leaving her on it. She traps Luffy’s cremates so they can not leave, and as Luffy gets angrier at Uta, things get more heated. It causes them to fight.

Now, I feel as though the plot twist that she was going to be the ‘villain’ was quite obvious, but it was still a good one to bring the story along.

Luffy is saved by friends and they work together to figure out what is really going on here. They meet an old man that had raised Uta on the island after she was abandoned. He tells them the story of Uta. Turns out, Uta had eaten a Sing Sing fruit, which gave her the power to trap anyone that heard her sing in a fake dream world that she alone could control and they were in it.

In real life, they were knocked out on the island. Fast forward a bit later, Luffy’s crew found a way out of the trap and were now searching for a way out of the dream world. They find the only way out was through defeating the Demon King, who could only be summoned by a song called “Tot Musica.”

The Demon King had to be summoned in both the dream world, and the real one and had to be attacked at the same time to be defeated. Luffy becomes angry and goes to Uta without the others. He tries to talk to Uta but inevitably fails.

As the others come to help, the dream world Uta is trapped.

In real life though, the marines had been coming for Uta to stop her. They found her eating wake-shrooms, which made a person stay up forever, but eventually killed them. Her plan was to eat them until she died, trapping everyone in the dream world.

Soon, Shanks came to get her. They get into it, and Uta decides to summon the Demon King.

Now, while they are fighting we find the real plot twist. Turns out, Shanks wasn’t actually the one who destroyed the island. When they (Shanks’s crew) were visiting the island, Shanks had Uta sing for the people. Everything was going great until it was almost the end of her show.

She found Tot Musica and because she was so young she did not know what it would do. She sang it and summoned the Demon King. It went on a rampage, destroying everything. Luckily, Uta was young and her stamina ran out quickly, causing it to disappear.

Shanks did not want her to be captured by the marines so he left her on the island and took the blame for the destruction. Well turns out, Uta already knew that it was her! But she was in too deep to turn around. The Demon King absorbs her and fights everyone.

Fast forward, they’ve defeated it and are out of the dream world. The marines decide not to take her in because they say they do not want to fight Shanks at the moment.

Now, in the end, I was a bit confused. Earlier Shanks had tried to give Uta the medicine for the wake shrooms, but she threw it on the ground and said she wouldn’t take it until she fixes things. After things were fixed we never saw her drink the medicine ,and we didn’t see her leave with Shanks.

So, either she drank it off-screen and we just couldn’t see her in the shot of Shanks leaving, or she died and was buried/left on the island. I really hope it’s the first one.

All in all, this movie was really great. I love how it was worked together and we got more Shanks lore because you can never have too much of that (Even though it’s non-canon).

They perfectly explained why we don’t see Uta in the canon series (at least where I am in the series), and I like to believe that this can be turned into something canon in the future.