One Piece: The Desert Princess and the Pirates: Adventure in Alabasta

Luffy and his crew reach the kingdom of Alabasta. The country is on the edge of civil war: there has been no rain for years, the people believe the king caused it deliberately and the rebellion is growing. Behind it is Crocodile, who wants to bring the king down and take the country, and who planned all of it. Vivi, who is with the crew, is the princess of this country and has come back to stop the war. Takahiro Imamura directs. The source is Eiichiro Oda's manga and the film compresses the Alabasta arc. It is one of the One Piece features and reduces the long Alabasta strand of the television series to a single film, so the narrative is fast and some sections are skipped. The idea of the series is friendship and Alabasta is where the manga works it hardest; Vivi caught between her country and the crew is the emotional centre. The animation is better than the television series, particularly the desert and the mass battle, which were redrawn. The problem is the compression. There are too many characters for a newcomer, the relationships are unexplained, and the meaning of some encounters is lost. Who it is for: viewers of One Piece and anyone who likes adventure anime. Who it is not for: it is hard to follow without the series, the narrative is fast, and the emotional passages get too little room.