To kick off this little retrospective about One Piece spin-offs and One Piece related stuff, let’s talk about Monsters: 103 Mercies, Dragon, Damnation, a short anime film adaptation of a 1994 Eiichiro Oda’s one-shot manga, simply – and terribly – titled “Monsters”, though most fans of One Piece have most likely read it when it was later recompiled in “Wanted!”, a volume collection of Oda’s pre-One Piece one shot mangas.
Apparently it was previously adapted in 2021… as a voice comic audio thing, but again, it was a “voice comic” affair, something made as part of the celebration for the series’ publishing its 100th volume, so this 2024 anime adaptation for streaming services like Netflix might as well be the first.
As to why this one-shot in particular is relevant to One Piece, well, it basically has a proto-Zoro (and technically a sort of draft for Mihawk’s design as well) type of character, a samurai named Ryuma, which would actually be a character in One Piece as well, though – as in usual fashion for the series – we wouldn’t know who he was and what his relevance was until decades (until the last act of the Land Of Wa arc) after debutting indirectly in the Thriller Bark story arc (and the dragon slaying thing also being brought up in Punk Hazard).
Here Ryuma is a wandering samurai that is saved from starvation from a kind girl running a restaurant, herself being the only survivor of a dragon attack on her village, thanks to the aid of a master swordman named Cyrano/Shirano that rescued her as a child from the flames. Ryuma and Cyrano/Shirano have a scuffle as the samurai is very keen on observing sword etiquette (which also states if sword hilts touch, it’s basically reason enough to having to engage a duel), but eventually a shady man arrives and calls upon a dragon with a magic horn, leading to the truth coming about, and Ryuma having to save the village from the dragon.
Given it’s a short story, it’s fitting the anime adaptation is about as long as one would expect, as in 25 minutes, there’s simply very little to draw from in terms of source material, and i doubt making up shit for the sake of balooning the animation to 60 or even 90 minutes would have made things actually better, instead of notably worse.
Speaking of animation… look, this is an old one-shot by Oda, it’s not like this sacred text not be trifled with, but the first minutes are iffy, especially the introduction sequence to the city, it’s short but it’s so jarringly ass looking it’s hard not to notice, alongside some cop outs that would make sense for shows that released episodes weekly and have been going on since forever, not a dedicated ONA project.
These issue thankfully become irrelevant/are ironed out fairly quickly, to be honest, direction by Sunghoo Park is ok and overall the animation is fairly decent, not bad as it’s basically the first project from a fairly new studio, E & H Production, formed by the aforementioned Sunghoo Park, a former MAPPA animator, and this is apparently the studio’s first actual project, they later did animation work for Adult Swim’s Ninja Kamui, and on the upcoming Red Cat Ramen anime adaptation, alongside something called “Bullet/Bullet”.
To conclude, Monsters: 103 Mercies it’s fairly faithful adaptation of the manga short story (almost to a fault), that also adds a post credit scene (that uses stock footage from the TV series) in order to connect the story to One Piece’s, which does make sense and was basically the only real motive to adapt it in its own anime nowadays, instead of doing an anthology project of all of Oda’s pre-One Piece minor short works from his earlier days.
Could have used both better direction and animation, but then again the source material is a fairly forgotten curiosity from Oda’s formative years as a manga artist, a cute but fairly forgettable tale that has been retroactively tied to One Piece’s mythos even though it was never meant to.
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