Netflix’s live-action One Piece turns the best manga into content material

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece could be one of many best comics ever made. It’s definitely one of many most comics ever made. An over-the-top action-comedy about Monkey D. Luffy, a boy with stretchy powers and a dream of discovering the legendary treasure One Piece and turning into King of the Pirates, One Piece is equal components Looney Tunes and fantasy epic at an incomparable scale. With 1,090 chapters printed throughout 106 volumes telling a steady story begun in 1997 — accompanied by an equally long-running anime adaptation with 1,073 episodes below its belt, a number of animated function movies, video video games, and a handful of stage performs — One Piece’s quantity is matched solely by its reputation because the top-selling manga of all time, by an enormous margin.

Consequently, Netflix’s live-action One Piece adaptation has a litany of expectations to handle. There’s the conventional weight of immense fan anticipation, however there’s additionally all method of complicating components by which One Piece can be judged: as an American adaptation of a Japanese work; as the most recent in a string of often disappointing live-action takes on manga and anime; and, most significantly, as Netflix’s newest try and carry a beloved anime to dwell motion following the frustration of Cowboy Bebop.

The ghost of Cowboy Bebop

Photograph: Geoffrey Brief/Netflix

Photograph: Casey Crafford/Netflix

In case your first query concerning the live-action One Piece is about the way it compares to the live-action Bebop, the reply is that it’s simply higher, but in addition that perhaps that’s an unfair comparability. Tonally, One Piece is a much more easy work — very like the supply materials, Netflix’s One Piece follows Monkey D. Luffy’s (Iñaki Godoy) quixotic journey to turn out to be King of the Pirates with nothing however the garments on his again and the powers he obtained as a boy when he ate a mystical fruit that turned his physique into rubber. In contrast to Cowboy Bebop, which needed to juggle all method of stylistic shifts and existential malaise current in its supply materials, One Piece actually solely has one objective: making Luffy’s quest, and the numerous buddies and foes he meets alongside the best way, as fascinating as attainable.

At first, the present delights within the job. Showrunners Matt Owens and Steven Maeda ship a gap salvo of a premiere that does a outstanding job of bringing Oda’s work to life, introducing an uncanny world the place nearly everyone seems to be a pirate or pirate adjoining, and every of them has a gimmick of some form. For some time, it’s a blast to fulfill all of those folks: the taciturn swordsman Roronoa Zoro (Mackenyu), the intrepid thief Nami (Emily Rudd), the clown-themed pirate Buggy (Jeff Ward), and so forth. Sadly, all of it begins to collapse as soon as One Piece’s writers and administrators cease introducing us to their world and begin dwelling in it.

Structurally, the eight-episode first season of One Piece is concerning the sluggish formation of Luffy’s crew, the Straw Hat Pirates, as he travels the pirate-filled East Blue ocean to make a reputation for himself and discover the treasure of One Piece. As he stops at numerous colourful areas — a pirate carnival or an oceanic gourmand restaurant — Luffy makes a brand new pal and meets a brand new enemy, whereas flashbacks delve into the backstory of the nascent Straw Hat Pirates and what fuels their thirst for journey. What holds it again isn’t a lot that it’s a poor manga adaptation — the truth is, in some ways it’s glorious — however relatively, that it’s a Netflix present.

One Piece has a Netflix downside

Photograph: Joe Alblas/Netflix

Netflix is a notoriously opaque firm; the quantity of inventive management or enter it workouts on its tv reveals, and the way evenly that enter is distributed throughout its slate, is one thing for which viewers and critics have lengthy lacked onerous knowledge past the reveals themselves. After a decade of Netflix authentic programming, a visible home model started to emerge: a washed-out colour palette, dim synthetic lighting, and a reliance on very plain pictures the place the largest flex a cinematographer will make is the occasional monitoring shot and much too many Dutch angles.

Equally, Netflix dramas appeared to hew to a home model in how they had been plotted and paced, and because of the continued Writers Guild of America strike, we all know that numerous streaming TV’s dramatic ills could be traced again to how streamers develop their reveals. Unusual pacing, disjointed narratives, and an absence of sturdy character writing are pure penalties of firms which have eschewed writing staffs for a piecework method the place writers are employed after which subsequently let go, excluded from the method of creating the present.

One Piece wasn’t essentially made this manner, nevertheless it was made on this tradition, and it definitely adheres to its conventions. It’s also the present that has suffered essentially the most below these conventions since maybe The Sandman, one other adaptation of a beloved comedian with an indelible visible model that received washed out by Netflix’s signature method. (That was maybe no small a part of Bebop’s demise as properly.) It’s tragic, actually. Each facet of One Piece’s manufacturing sings: Its units are splendidly designed, its costuming feels true to the manga, its combat choreography is extraordinarily good at translating comedian motion to 3D, and its actors are absolutely dedicated — sufficient reward can’t be heaped on Godoy’s efficiency as Luffy, a casting resolution so excellent it hurts. Godoy is exuberant within the function, with the unbridled vitality of a cartoon character come to life and a toothy grin that endears everybody he encounters. But all of it’s undermined by that Netflix home model, muddying up these vibrant colours and staging these performances within the center distance.

Photograph: Casey Crafford/Netflix

Like numerous Netflix reveals, One Piece feels each too quick and too sluggish, prepared to chew by way of gobs of plot because it hops from locale to locale and flashes again and ahead by way of time, however hardly ever prepared to spend a lot of its 50-minute-plus episodes on easy character beats that present its solid simply hanging out with one another and being pirates. Due to this, if the plot isn’t taking the viewers someplace new or introducing them to a enjoyable new face, One Piece completely grinds to a halt as machinations play out across the Straw Hat Pirates and we anticipate them to inevitably remedy the issue in entrance of them. Once more: not a One Piece downside, however a Netflix one — a present shortly feels stale if all it’s involved with is exhibiting the viewer one thing new, as Netflix reveals too typically are. Tv is constructed not on novelty, however familiarity.

Manga battles, battling manga

Picture: Toei/Crunchyroll

It’s most likely price stating that One Piece is freaking bizarre. To its credit score, the Netflix sequence doesn’t draw back from its manga origins, which implies that its tone, storytelling tics, and tropes can really feel wildly dissonant for those who’re not aware of manga as a medium.

To the uninitiated, watching One Piece means coping with the style tropes of shonen manga, comics made primarily with younger boys in thoughts, even when their attraction extends far past that slim demographic. All the hallmarks are there: an earnest method to friendship; gonzo fights with colourful characters who’ve unexplained gimmicks; and a bent for characters to shout the names of their ending strikes, like they’re each skilled wrestlers and wrestling followers rolled up into one.

As jarring as this will appear, as soon as One Piece will get going, it’s not onerous to take its quirks in stride and see their attraction, particularly after they’re delivered with Godoy’s conviction and earnest allure. And that’s the irritating factor about One Piece — it feels so fixable. There may be actual treasure to be discovered right here, a real celebration of Eiichiro Oda’s work slightly below the floor of those eight episodes. Perhaps we’d see it, if the present got here from anyplace else.