Little Law.
What They Say:
The horrible secret of Flevance, the White Town, is revealed, giving clues to Law’s traumatic past! A rage born from the lies of the World Government created a child who had the will to kill Corazon!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
One Piece proved to be a lot of fun the last time around even if it did go with flashback material because we got to see young Doflamingo. While not a deep dive into his past, it was amusingly fun to see him at a young age and just as much of an ass as he is now. That helped to set a few things in motion and does clarify a little of his past, making it easy to understand the direction he’s taken over the course of his life. This also played well in the present with the fight that’s currently underway and the overall kind of chaos he’s placed the entire island under in order to maintain his particular style of control. Of course, the whole bit with the Celestial Dragons is certainly interesting in and of itself, but I do find myself wondering just how long until that actually gets dealt with since it feels like it’s a seeding piece in some ways.
The backstory does continue here though it advances a fair bit as we get Doflamingo a good bit older and in charge with the group that he has. What we get here is a ten-year-old Trafalgar Law, who also looks adorable in his oversized hat. Most of Doflamingo’s crew look as they do now, maybe a bit smaller in a sense, but generally adults and who we know them to be. Some of the politics of the moment are dealt with here, and the Don Quixote’s place in it, which is something that’s been fairly well settled for a bit. There’s some fun action as well as we see them deal with a port town attack with the thugs defending it and that allows us to see them in tip top shape that works well together. What does come from it though is some dialogue about Flevance, known as the White Town, which is described as being basically a fairy tale world of beauty and peace. The background on it is minor, but it’s a big part of Law, which we see in the flashback within the flashback.
This gives us a younger Law living with his parents and sister where he’s a studious young man and learning a lot from his father when it comes to medicine and there’re a lot of positive things here – even the little suit he wears. But then things started to go wrong in the country with basically people dying from a poison that had seeped into it. The tragedy that made it worse though is that other countries quarantined it basically, with high-ranking leaders escaping while everyone else was caged and killed if they tried to escape. It’s a brutal fall for a country that was the envy of the world when you get down to it. It also gets pretty personal as we see the way the perfect family that Law had falls apart and falls to the poison itself, something that is beyond traumatizing for a child to see. His escape is a simple one in the immediate sense, but there’s such a tragic scope to it all that it’s simply cruel to watch.
In Summary:
Though I’m certainly not a fan of the flashback within flashback approach that shows take from time to time, they do have their useful moments in exploring some of the deeper issues going on with certain characters. The focus on Flevance here with Law as a youngster helps to really delve into part of his mindset and some of the aloofness he has considering what he’s lost. It doesn’t really color my view of him as an adult, but it explains away pieces of the personality – pieces that are slowly being chipped away by the family nature of the Straw Hats to be sure. There’s some good material to be had here and it works well with what it wants to do, providing a flashback within a flashback that helps more than hinders or drags down events.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
