One Piece Season One

If you’re at all familiar with the pop culture landscape, you’ll know that movie adaptations of video games don’t have a good reputation, neither with critics nor audiences. That now seems to be changing with the arrival of the Mario movie, which made mad bank and managed to be inoffensive junk food instead of rancid spoiled milk, and especially HBO’s The Last Of Us TV series, which I’ll be discussing here on the blog at some point.

But the tide is only beginning to turn. For the moment, “based on the hit video game” is still a huge red flag.

Now, what if I told you that “based on the hit anime/manga” is an even bigger one?

Even Japanese attempts to adapt this material into live action frequently fail utterly, as demonstrated by the recent trilogy of live action Fullmetal Alchemist movies that looked like a moderately high-budget fan project. But when Americans attempt it? The results have been among the worst movies ever made, in any country.

A few years ago, some executive at Netflix had a mid-life crisis or something and decided that adapting anime and manga into big-budget live action streaming shows was a good idea. They started out with Cowboy Bebop, a late-90s classic that gained a huge and enduring following among the first wave of American anime fans when it aired on TV in the early 2000s.

This was a smart choice. Cowboy Bebop is a gritty sci-fi action/mystery story that already takes heavy inspiration from American film. For years it’s been near the top of many people’s “anime that it would be easy to adapt into a good live-action series” list, including mine.

Unfortunately they completely fucked it up, and the resulting mess was widely panned by both general audiences and fans alike before being swiftly canceled.

That probably should have been the end of Netflix’s anime ambitions, but for some reason they not only decided to keep going, but they plowed ahead with the decision to bankroll an ambitious, big-budget live-action adaptation of…One Piece.

I need to convey to you why trying to turn Eiichero Oda’s pirate manga into a Prestige TV property for people to watch in between Tiger King and Wednsday was a completely insane decision, but I’m honestly not even sure where to start. I could mention that the manga, which has been running since the 90s, has well over 1000 chapters and just recently finished what Oda refers to as its prologue. I could point out that the manga specializes in chaotic battles and elaborate fantasy world-building that could only be translated to the screen with a gigantic budget. Or that you could populate a small city with its cast, many of whom disappear for hundreds of chapters before re-emerging as vital plot elements. Or that the main character uses Mr. Fantastic stretchy limb powers because he ate a magic “devil fruit” called the Gum-Gum Fruit.

Or, I could just tell you that One Piece looks like this:

And keep in mind, that’s one of the less weird pages I could have chosen.

One Piece has a reputation for being an acquired taste even among seasoned manga and anime fans. That was how I reacted to it myself when I read through some two hundred chapters a few years ago, vacillating between “Hey people were right, this is pretty fun” and “What the fuck am I reading?”

But okay, Netflix decided to turn the thing into the next big streaming hit. Obviously, it goes without saying that they needed to make some heavy adaptational changes if the resulting series was going to have any hope of catching on. Like, probably change the title to something normal and cool like Skull Tides or Blood Sails or something. Drop the gum-gum powers and weird costumes, put everyone in edgelord Pirates Of The Caribbean outfits and

Oh sorry, hang on. The original manga author is an executive producer and the two show-runners are mega-fans of the property, so they basically didn’t change anything. All that stupid bullshit I just described is still in there. The protagonist is still a “rubber man” who fights by making his arms and legs all stretchy. Most of the characters are wearing bizarre cosplay outfits. The cat-themed pirates who wear cat outfits and hiss, like cats, are totally still here. The madlads just went for it.

So it goes without saying that the resulting product immediately bombed, harder and more spectacularly than anything has ever bombed before, bombed so catastrophically that it might actually take Netflix with it and

Sorry, I’m getting more information all of a sudden, apparently it was wildly popular and a second season is basically a done deal, even if it hasn’t been officially announced has officially been greenlit.

I…didn’t see that coming, to be honest, but if there’s one thing we can be absolutely certain of, it’s that there’s no way Netflix’s live-action One Piece TV series—I’ll say that again, Netflix’s live-action One Piece TV series—is actually good.

……Right?

Onenet Flixpiece has the same premise as its manga counterpart: in a fantastical world covered in treacherous oceans, the Pirate King Gold Roger launched a golden age of piracy by announcing before his execution that he left all of his treasure somewhere on the fabled Grand Line, all in one titular piece, waiting for the first person brave and strong enough to find it. Seeking these legendary riches, people flocked to the seas in record numbers, and the world government’s ruthless Marines rose in turn to oppose them.

Twenty years later, Monkey D. Luffy is a naive and idealistic young man who sets out to reach the Grand Line, find the One Piece and become the new king of the pirates. He is aided in this endeavor by having eaten the Gum-Gum Devil Fruit as a child, which makes him basically invincible, albeit at the cost of taking away his ability to swim. I’m sure that won’t be inconvenient for a pirate captain.

Also, there’s a whole load of nonsense about ancient civilizations and something called the “Will Of D” that’s only barely been hinted at so far, even though, again, this manga has been running weekly for over a quarter of a century.

This initial season doesn’t really touch any of that though, adapting the first major saga of the manga and covering Luffy meeting and recruiting his initial four crewmates, taking on a vicious fishman warlord who one of said crewmates turns out to have a history with, acquiring a proper ship and setting sail for the Grand Line. In doing so the season compresses ninety six manga chapters into only eight episodes (two less than were originally planned–the season got cut down over budget concerns) which frankly shouldn’t have worked at all. That it not only works, but manages to improve on the source material in a few ways, is kind of a miracle.

Showrunners Matt Owens and Steven Maeda make some genuinely clever writing choices. This stretch of material in the manga is comprised of episodic story arcs that don’t have any real connection to each other (or at least, don’t appear to have any connection until much later), so the show ties them together by making Arlong, villain of the final arc, into a larger presence throughout.

This is a fairly minor change from the manga; a much bigger one is expanding a very simple series of title-page gags about a Marine that Luffy befriends into a fully fleshed-out season B-plot. In the course of this, the show grabs some material about Luffy’s backstory that in the manga isn’t even hinted at until hundreds of chapters later and inserts it here, much earlier in the narrative.

This is a risky move. When it comes to TV adaptations, I find that they usually do okay with porting the source material directly onto the screen. Where they tend to fall down is in inventing new storylines via expanding minor characters and sub-plots. If done badly, it can feel like the show is just trying to fill time because it turns out that the source material didn’t actually have enough meat to sustain an entire season of forty-five minute episodes, and it’s also the point where the show’s writer or writers must leap from the scaffolding provided by the original author–and if said writer or writers aren’t very good, this is the moment when that fact will reveal itself.

Happily, One Piece does not run into this issue. I actually thought that the Netflix-original material was some of the strongest writing in this season, adding in a big dose of the kind of serialized, mystery-heavy storytelling that modern viewers of live-action TV have come to expect, but without feeling discordant next to the stuff that was brought over straight from the manga.

Eichiiero Oda’s involvement may be a key factor here. One Piece has become famous for the incredible intricacy of its plotting–it’s not uncommon for some minor character or throwaway worldbuilding detail to be revealed, hundreds of chapters later, to have been a piece of foreshadowing for some huge plot revelation–but like all writers of ongoing serialized fiction, Oda didn’t have every detail of the entire story thought out back in 1997, and it’s at times obvious that he was coming up with new ideas on the spot. Knowing that he was heavily involved with this adaptation, it’s hard not to see some of these changes as Oda rewriting his own story with the benefit of hindsight, working in details that hadn’t occurred to him when he was drawing this part of the story originally. If so, that means the live action series as a whole could be seen as a kind of “second draft” of the manga, created from a more mature perspective when its author had more of the fine details worked out.

One other way that the live action show improves on the manga is in its pacing. One of the original One Piece’s flaws is that it is, at heart, an epic fantasy saga like The Lord Of The Rings being forced into the structure of a shonen battle story, and that means that the plot frequently slams to a halt so the characters can have long, multi-chapter fights against disposable villains. A seasonal TV series doesn’t have time for this, so the live-action version cuts back heavily on the episodic battles, to the story’s benefit. One entire villain and his extensive entourage of sub-villains are disposed of almost entirely, but even the ones that are just as important to the plot here as they were in the manga get dispatched by our heroes in a much speedier fashion.

Not that the series feels like it’s rushing, mind you. The important fights still have plenty of time to breathe–the entire second episode is taken up with a confrontation with fan-favourite villain Buggy The Clown, for instance–it’s just that there’s far less of the “I’m invincible, you can’t defeat me!”, “Oh no you’ve unleashed your special attack, I’m losing!”, “But a-ha, I’ve powered up and now I’m invincible again!” back-and-forth that in the manga can get exhausting and repetitive. Here, the fights tend to be a much more explosive clash, with victory or defeat coming down to single split-second decisions rather than a process of attrition where combatants can get extensively pulverized and still get back up afterwards and turn the tables. This allows the smarter parts of One Piece’s action writing to shine–the manga is always better when the heroes use clever tricks and gambits to win instead of pure power–and it has the added bonus of making all of the characters, good and bad, feel a lot more vulnerable and in danger of death than they were originally.

These changes are in places substantial, but on a macro scale the One Piece series is one of the most faithful live-action adaptation I’ve ever seen. That’s mostly due to the show’s refusal to ameliorate the manga’s wacky designs for live action even a bit. Even where it does make aesthetic changes, some of them actually make the live-action version of the manga stranger and cartoonier.

Which isn’t to say that no concessions have been made in the name of pleasing the wine moms and true crime guys who make up so much of Netflix’s audience. The characters might look like they stepped right off the page of Oda’s manga, but they don’t act like it.

Luffy’s child-like naivety and spacey attitude are still present, but his stupidity and occasionally callous nature have been largely pruned out. Nami’s violent tsundere shtick is softened into snarky sarcasm. Usopp’s cowardice is way less annoying now. Sanji’s ladies-man thing is a lot more subtle. Zoro…

Actually Zoro might be the one aspect where the series goes a little too far. Japanese actor Makenyu plays the character with almost none of manga-Zolo’s wildness or bone-headedness, which leads to a live-action version that’s barely recognisable, and doesn’t stand out enough from this version of Nami. But Zoro is kind of a boring character anyway, so whatever.

I went into this series with absolutely rock-bottom expectations. After the first episode I was pleasantly surprised; by the end of the last episode, I thought it was one of the best seasons of TV I’d ever seen. The show absolutely gets across the cheesy, 1000% earnest charm of the manga’s big emotional crescendos, and I can’t wait to see how the next season–and the seasons beyond, eh Netflix?--continue that.