One Piece’s anime has been nothing short of stunning over the last few years, with the Wano Arc widely being seen as the turning point for the series. Since the conclusion of the Wano Arc, One Piece has managed to keep up its quality of animation, arguably even stepping up its game even more for the Egghead Arc. With the anime even going on hiatus for half a year to further improve its animation, fans had high expectations going into the second half of the Egghead Arc, and the entire Kuma flashback has not let fans down in that regard.
That said, with the big emotional flashback all wrapped up, One Piece’s Egghead Arc is now moving onto the second stage of its story, slowly building up to its epic climax and the big showdown of the arc. However, the latest episode has been a huge disappointment, possibly even being one of the worst episodes One Piece’s anime has released in a while, and the only thing to blame is the CGI.
One Piece’s Latest Episode Experiments With CGI and Fails
Episode 1140 of One Piece sees the Buster Call being initiated on Egghead, with the hundred Marine ships surrounding the island finally opening cannon fire. However, right from the get-go, the episode hits fans in the face with a ton of CGI explosions. These feel extremely out of place side by side with the series’ style of animation, especially with the explosions and the smoke being hyper-realistic. While anime like Demon Slayer have been able to pull off using CGI for its explosions and even make it look good, in One Piece’s case, the CGI animation simply clashed too much with the anime’s existing art style.
The CGI explosions only multiply in frequency as the Pacifista turn on the Marines at Bonney’s orders, and as the Giant Pirates make their entrance. To make matters even worse, the episode mixes in regular animated explosions with the CGI-animated ones. While other instances of CGI in the episode aren’t quite as egregious, the explosions are still quite distracting and take away from what is otherwise quite an exciting episode with Luffy re-emerging in Gear Five and Bonney finally recognizing him as Nika.
Overall, Episode 1140 comes across as a huge experiment, but it seems like Toei simply missed the mark. It makes sense why the series may be playing around with CGI, given the upcoming Elbaf Arc and the large-scale battle about to engulf Egghead, and as nice as it is to see more naval warfare in One Piece, the CGI animation definitely needs some refining. Until then, it’s safe to say that One Piece’s anime needs to stay away from CGI and Toei needs to keep doing what they’ve been doing so far.
One Piece can be streamed on Crunchyroll and Netflix.
The post I’ll Say It: One Piece’s New Episode Proves It Needs To Stay Away From CGI appeared first on ComicBook.com.