One Piece: The Movie

Directed by Atsuji Shimizu, the film stands apart from the canon while fitting the quiet stretch between the Syrup Village and Baratie arcs, when the crew numbered four and sailed the Going Merry. It pits them against Eldoraggo, a ruthless captain wielding the Goe Goe no Mi who has obtained a map to the legendary Isle of Gold.

The emotional core belongs to an old oden vendor named Ganzo and his grandson Tobio, the last living links to Woonan, the pirate whose buried treasure everyone seeks.

Starving after Luffy wastes their provisions, the crew is robbed by a band of thieves working for Eldoraggo, who then capsizes the Merry with a destructive scream. Zoro saves Luffy and the boy Tobio, and the smell of food leads them to the floating oden shop of Tobio's grandfather Ganzo, where the pair end up chained together as punishment for not paying.

Eldoraggo reaches the Isle of Gold with Nami stowed away and Usopp captured to read the map, and the scattered crew reunites on a hill where Nami reveals she stole the map. Inside a cave they find Ganzo, who recounts how his childhood friend Woonan abandoned their village to chase gold, leaving Ganzo to build his traveling oden shop instead.

When Eldoraggo strikes Ganzo down and stomps his oden, Luffy defiantly eats the stew and launches a counterattack, Zoro felling Golass while Luffy shatters the villain's golden armor and hurls him off the island. In Woonan's tunnel the crew finds only his skeleton and a deathbed letter confessing that the adventure, not the gold, was what he truly cherished, the treasure being a torn flag from his last day with Ganzo.

The film screened as a double feature with a Digimon movie at Toei's 2000 Spring Anime Fair, where the pairing grossed roughly 2.16 billion yen and earned a Silver Excellence commendation at the Golden Gross Awards.

Eiichiro Oda attended an early screening and praised the film in Weekly Shonen Jump. It was Toei's only One Piece production made with traditional ink-and-paint, as the TV series and every later film moved to digital coloring.