One Piece 3D - Straw Hat Chase
Today is a special day. Just over fifteen years ago, Some-Stuffs was created by several Yibis forum members out of a desire to make our own fansub and scanlation group for One Piece. As such, the first project we decided to tackle was a scanlation of the One Piece manga from the beginning. Though the project was soon abandoned due to lack of interest and our own inexperience, One Piece was in our blood, so we knew we wanted to do more with the series. Indeed, our first fansub project ever was the 2008 special One Piece: Romance Dawn Story, a re-imagining of the manga one shot Romance Dawn V1. First released by us in early 2012, it would mark the first and last One Piece project from Some-Stuffs… until today!
Some-Stuffs is proud to present to you this brand new fansub of the eleventh One Piece film, as well as our first project available to view in 3D on VR headsets and other compatible 3D displays: One Piece 3D: Straw Hat Chase! For years, our staff has talked about finally subbing this film to give it the treatment it deserves, so in honor of our group turning fifteen last month, we’ve done just that. “But wait,” I hear you say. “Today is April Fools’ day! You just subbed this as a joke! And I don’t even own a VR headset or a Nintendo 3DS!” Rest assured concerned straw man, this release is anything but a joke, and we got you covered. Though our timing could be considered unfortunate, we took this project 100% seriously. To date, One Piece 3D: Straw Hat Chase is the only film in the One Piece series to be fully 3D animated and the first and only that was screened in 3D, so what better way to experience it than in the comfort of 3D VR or in glasses-less 3D on your Nintendo 3DS? You can also enjoy the film in 2D like all of our other projects, but why would you want that when you can see Nami and Robin’s DDs in 3D?
Anyway, since you’re likely now reading this on our website after checking out one or more of the torrent descriptions, I’d like to preface the rest of this blog post with a warning. I will be fully spoiling the plot of this movie, so I highly recommend giving it a watch before reading what I have to say. Even if you’ve seen it before, the older English subtitles available online failed to capture the complexities of the Japanese script, so viewing the film again with our subs will deepen your appreciation and understanding of what it was trying to achieve.
Done watching? Good! Let’s get into it!
One Piece 3D: Straw Hat Chase opens by introducing us to two unfamiliar characters named Schneider and Buzz. Schneider, an elderly man seen coughing up blood, attempts to flee without success from his canine companion Buzz. Schneider is keenly aware of the fact that he doesn’t have much longer to live, so we quickly learn that his attempts to push Buzz away are to protect him from seeing his beloved owner suffer and die. This element of the story is clearly in reference to the real life story of the dog Hachiko, an Akita dog who waited almost ten years for his owner, Ueno Hidesaburo, after his passing in May of 1925. Knowing that Buzz will never leave his side willingly, Schneider concocts a plan to ensure that Buzz will leave him and never come back after learning that the infamous pirate Monkey D. Luffy is nearby. It isn’t until later that we learn Schneider told Buzz that he can rejoin him only if he manages to steal Luffy’s precious Straw Hat given to him by Red-Haired Shanks as a child. A daunting task to be sure, but one that Buzz decides to take on for the sake of his owner.
At this point the audience is then presented the title of the film, though its intended meaning isn’t clear at this point. One would likely assume the title refers to the Straw Hat crew being chased by someone, and this is partially correct as we later discover. However, in the scene following the title reveal we’re placed in the perspective of an unknown figure we later learn to be Buzz as he searches the Thousand Sunny for Luffy’s hat, which he manages to snatch while most of the crew is fast asleep. Upon waking up, Luffy is in absolute shambles once he realizes his Straw Hat isn’t where he left last night. His repeated use of the word “Gone!” informs us that his hat is, in fact, gone, and this is further emphasized as he tears through every room in the Thousand Sunny in search of it. In the process, Luffy barges in on Nami while she’s taking a bath, but due to his state of duress and his lack of sexual response, we’re able to accept that she doesn’t report him for sexual assault. Luffy is also a wanted pirate, so it’s unclear if the encounter would even be a factor during his sentencing due to the other crimes he’s committed previously in the story.
After Luffy fails to find his hat, the Straw Hat pirates convene and determine that the only course of action is to help him find it since their captain is a petulant child incapable of fulfilling his duties as captain over a stupid fucking hat. After some searching, the crew encounters both Buzz and Schneider, and the true meaning of the title of the film becomes clear. Not only are the Straw Hats being chased, but they themselves are chasing after Luffy’s stolen hat! Wow! I can’t believe how clever that is. Actually insane. So yeah, they find Schneider who’s dying or whatever and take him aboard the Sunny, while at the same time they go after Buzz. Then the Navy shows up (good foreshadowing!) and starts chasing after the Straw Hats, leading to an epic chase scene where Usopp decides to be a backseat ship driver for Franky so that he’ll be distracted and end their lives by smashing into the cliff.
Unfortunately, it’s at this point where the film completely loses me. After nearly dying in a horrific boating accident, the Straw Hats discover that the Navy is closing in on them. Luffy finally decides to act as Captain and commands Franky to make the Sunny go faster, to which he responds by falsely claiming that the ship can’t go any faster. Like, are you fucking serious, Franky? Did you forget your stupid ship made out of magic wood or whatever the fuck can literally rocket away at insane speeds with coup de burst? Sounds like insubordination to me. They could have died. Like, for real. “Can’t go any faster” my fucking ass. Is he saving the cola to drink it all for himself or what? Does he realize how much sugar that is? Apparently sugar is just completely healthy in the world of One Piece. Master world building by Oda Eiichiro. I genuinely don’t understand why Luffy even kept this dumbfuck robot on the crew after this. I know Luffy has like every learning disability, but even for him this is shockingly inept. Just tell him to use coup de burst! What’s he gonna do, say no? Gimme a break. That is bullshit and whoever wrote this movie knew that and IGNORED IT. Seriously, what were they thinking? Give me an hour and a line of coke and I’ll write another eleven one piece movies that make more sense than this one. This shit pisses me off so much. Oh, and we know for a fact that they had plenty of cola since LATER in the film they actually DO use coup de burst! So what, did Franky know they were gonna need it later on? Is he just that good at determining when imminent mortal danger isn’t as serious as other imminent mortal danger? Wanna know what I call that? LAZY. FUCKING. WRITING. Even just writing this is elevating my fucking blood pressure to dangerous levels. Do you know how old I was when Some-Stuffs was founded? SEVEN-FUCKING-TEEN. I’m literally in my 30’s now. Hell, I’m turning 33 TOMORROW. I’m no spring chicken anymore, let’s face it. My best years are behind me. You think a fucking fossil like me can handle this kind of stress? Hell no! Literally all I’m asking is that SOMEONE at Toei prevent these kind of insane errors from making it into theatrical One Piece films. It’s… wait. I just realized. Because they were completely surrounded, there was no safe way for them to use coup de burst anyway. So, uh… never mind, I guess?
Anyway, if you’ve made it this far into my absolutely fucking unhinged wall of text, congratulations. Your reward is that you get to learn my actual thoughts on this film and the reason we decided to sub it. So, the whole thing about this being an anniversary project was bullshit. Some-Stuffs actually did turn fifteen on March 18 last month, but that had literally nothing to do with us subbing this movie. A few members of our staff, myself included, had talked about subbing this movie due to all the other options being abysmal, and I believe at some point last year one of us floated the idea of subbing it for our prank release this year since last year we had already planned something else. So earlier this year it was brought up again and we actually managed to get a full team together who was willing to work on it, for some reason. Because yeah, to be honest, none of us actually really like this movie. It’s not terrible, but it’s unbelievably ugly and even for One Piece fans the story is incredibly dull and uninspired. That said, we strongly believe in putting our best effort into projects we don’t like since at least SOME people out there must like this movie, and they deserve to watch it with an accurate and well-written translation. And in the interest of being even more transparent, despite how I’ve written the rest of this post, I’m actually writing this on March 11. We’re basically already done subbing the movie and are holding onto it for the 1st of next month, and the reason for that is because most of us who worked on this are also going to be working on the first episode of the Steel Ball Run anime (Which will have already been out for nearly two weeks by the time you’re reading this, so we’ve presumably already put a good chunk of work into that).
So yeah, I guess that’s all I really have to say about this. If you like this movie, I hope you enjoy our work on it. Huge thanks to everyone on the team who got this done, especially NotKama for QCing and bringing the character editing more in line with his work on our HatSubs releases. I wanted to edit this myself since I haven’t worked on One Piece since Romance Dawn Story and thought it would be a fun project. It, uh, wasn’t, but all the same, I don’t regret doing it. Oh, and as for why this isn’t a HatSubs release, that’s simple. We had a full team work on this, so that made it a Some-Stuffs release. We also just thought it was funny to release a One Piece project with the Some-Stuffs tag after all this time, so there’s that too. Anyway, I need to go back to pretending this is a serious post about the movie so that anyone who skips to the end will miss out on this, so time to go back to shitposting. I didn’t generate a single word of this entire fucking monstrosity with AI, so rest assured that a real meatbag spent actual hours writing all of this dumb bullshit. Thanks for reading, and have a good one! Also, feel free to share bits of this post after April 1st 2026 is over. I only want the most dedicated Some-Stuffsers to read this today.
Ha, I fucking lied! Josh of the less distant past has taken over. It’s now March 26th and holy shit, this project went off the fucking rails after I wrote most of this. We originally had only intended to sub the 2D version of the film and call it a day, but near the end of the subbing process I learned that this movie was released on Blu-ray 3D, and it put a nasty thought in my head. “What if I make a version of this film that can be watched on a Nintendo 3DS?” And yep, that’s right, I actually did it. So to update, we have indeed put in a huge amount of work into episode 1 of Steel Ball Run. Since you’re a fucking trooper and actually got this far, I’ll even let you know that there’s a possibility that we’ll be releasing it the week of April 5th. This is literally the only place I’m even going to mention that too, so enjoy the info. ANYWAY, I spent more time learning how to make the 3DS version than actually editing the dialogue for this film, so there’s that. It was significantly more work than I expected and I had to get help from an awesome encoder named Fella to make it happen, but we got it done in time. I honestly like this version the most out of the three we’re releasing and I hope that a lot of people are able to enjoy the film in 3D this way. I’ve talked a lot of shit about Straw Hat Chase in this post, but seeing it in 3D actually did give me more of an appreciation for it. Though honestly, the 1080p 3D version is the best way to watch imo. But anyway, enough about that shit. Get this. The Nintendo 3DS came out on February 11th, 2011. The very site you’re presumably on right now was created on March 18th, 2011. Straw Hat Chase came out in theaters on March 19th, 2011. HOW DID THAT EVEN HAPPEN? I swear to god, we didn’t do that on purpose. It was a complete accident that this came together on the 15th anniversary of all three of those things. So yeah, I guess this actually could be considered a triple anniversary project. I’m actually really happy how ridiculous this whole project became and ended up enjoying it way more than I expected. So yeah, that’s actually it for real this time. The rest of this blog post is just dumb filler shit for people who skip to the end. OR IS IT? It is. Please. Stop reading. I’m begging you.
Ha! I lied again! You idiot! It’s the day before release and I’m finishing this bitch last minute! Here are some comments from our staff who worked on this thing!
Buzz is the most sinister villain in all of One Piece because only the evilest of evil entities would steal someone's Hat. -The Giraffe
Hey nakama, Toto here. It's such an honour to finally be part of the team and to start working on a project as amazing as One Piece Movie 11, I could NOT be happier. It's literally a top 3 One Piece movie for me. The team has worked really hard to bring the magic to everyone's eye balls and I can guarantee to those that have never watched this movie, they will never forget what an experience it was. I hope you all enjoy. -Totomeister
Finally, we arrive at the climatic battle on the Navy base. Luffy and Zoro attempt to fight their way out themselves, but the Navy forces are too much for them to handle. It’s worth keeping in mind that this is a pre-time skip film, so the two of them aren’t the absolute monsters they become later in the series, so their struggle here makes sense and helps up the stakes. But finally, when all hope seems lost, the rest of the crew makes a crash landing on the Navy base just in time to join the fight! We also get a beautiful teary-eyed reunion between Buzz and Schneider. Schneider admits he messed up by asking Buzz to steal Luffy’s hat, so now the true final battle can begin! The combined strength of the Straw Hat crew overwhelms the Navy, but Luffy’s hat ends up flying out towards the sea where he may never find it again. Using the air contained inside his body from Gear 3, Luffy propels himself out over the ocean in a desperate bid to reclaim his stolen hat. He nearly has it in his hand, but then sadly plummets toward the unforgiving sea below…
...only for Buzz to swoop in and rescue him from certain death! With Luffy on his back, Buzz flies toward the hat and helps Luffy grab it, finally reuniting him with his precious Straw Hat. It’s a beautiful moment of catharsis and an especially satisfying moment for fans of the series who have grown used to Luffy constantly wearing his signature hat. With his hat in hand, Luffy and Buzz fly off into the sunset, ending the chase.
With everything wrapped up, we get a short epilogue scene with the Straw Hat crew, as well as Schneider and Buzz, celebrating on the Sunny. Chopper informs Schneider that he wasn’t actually dying and just had a fork stuck in his throat! With renewed health and a lesson learned, Schneider and Buzz say their good-byes. Schneider says that when they meet next he won’t show any mercy to Luffy, which Luffy accepts as a challenge with a huge grin on his face. The credits roll, we hear Shanks’ famous lines from when he first gave Luffy his precious Straw Hat, and the film ends. Wow! So yeah, that’s that’s it! If you read this far, thanks for reading my thoughts on this wonderful film in the One Piece franchise! We spent a lot of time working on this film and are thrilled to have given it the treatment it finally deserves after 15 years. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we enjoyed working on it! Happy April Fools’ Day!