Review- One Piece Live Action Season 1

 

I have tried writing this review at least five times, and after all of that I’ve come to the conclusion that I just can’t separate my thoughts on the live action One Piece adaptation. My attempt in those reviews was to talk about the show as a show, and then talk about the show as a One Piece fan, but I am honestly unable to convey these thoughts separately since they are so entangled and connected to each other. So, I will do my best to be balanced, but know that the perspective I am coming from is that of a super fan, who also is just a fan of really good television.

The best thing I can say about this live action anime adaptation is that it feels like a real tv show and not some weird fan film. This can be attributed to three pillars that keep the show balanced: plotting, acting, and choreography. The plotting does a mostly satisfactory job of mixing up the story of One Piece’s first saga, and most everything is connected in one way or another. This is something that the live action has over the source material, as each crew members arc felt mostly isolated from the others in the manga, but thanks to the plotting in the live action, there is connected relevance to all the characters actions. The best thing I can say about the acting is that it does not try to match the manga 1:1, a huge pitfall for other adaptations of anime and manga, and that all of these characters feel real enough that their characterization can shine through the performance, instead of being hindered by it. Finally, the choreography is quite good for adapting such an “out there” world, a world where a small dagger can send a fully grown man flying back 15 feet.

As a fan of One Piece, there’s also a lot to enjoy just from the aspect of a do over of these characters. Every outfit they wear is something that Oda, the author of One Piece, has drawn before, and the easter eggs included in this adaptation do a good job of widening the scope of what this world has to offer, be that in simple name drops like the island Jaya or the inclusion of Baroque Works, a shady and mysterious organization, that the showrunners chose to set up now instead of having to establish later. This gives a type of continuity to the world that Oda was not able to achieve at the beginning of writing One Piece, since these elements weren’t even thought of until years down the line.

Before the live action came out, Oda quoted the One Piece manga, telling fans to “stop counting what you’ve lost”, referring to the changes the live action was making to the source material in the transfer of mediums that One Piece was making. While I recognize the value in what Oda is saying, I can’t help but feel that my gripes are more than just small nitpicks, as a serious issue this show has is a lack of impact of big, defining moments, all in an effort to the keep the plot train moving. Let me explain. In episode 1 of live action One Piece, the main villain is Captain “Axe Hand” Morgan, whom the group of budding Straw Hats pirates have to defeat after stealing a map of the Grand Line from him. The live action portrays Morgan as a man with a big axe hand and a bigger ego, but besides that, nothing he directly says or does makes him a villain, he is just an antagonistic force for our protagonists to beat up and then run away. Contrast that with the manga, where he tells his soldiers to shoot a child, the live action Morgan is not a bad guy by any knowable means. So, light spoiler, when he arrested in episode 2, this moment feels like it needs to happen because it was in the source material, rather than the motivating factor being an element of what happened in this plot. The live action is filled with moments like this where, as a fan, I feel like the impact of these moments in live action, be they backstories or other motivating elements for the characters, are way lessened in comparison to the impact they had in the manga.

This lack of impact can be attributed to either an omission of certain scenes from the manga, or sometimes even just a pacing issue that the show suffers from itself. Every straw hat is impacted by this lack of impact in some way. For Usopp, his arc spends almost no time talking about what Usopp wants to do. This leads to him being the least developed Straw Hat of the 5, and his declaration that he will be a brave warrior of the sea feels like it comes out of left field, all because no groundwork was laid down previously about his dream. For Luffy and Nami, their backstories (as a manga reader) felt like they weren’t given the right space to be fleshed out because they are segmented over 1-2 episodes. Sanji’s backstory does not suffer from this issue because it’s all told in one go, letting us exist in the past for as long as we need to be, rather than constantly cutting back and forth. Although Zoro is given more screen time than Sanji, both are given a relatively solid base of characterization to move forward in the series, even if I have some small complaints about how they joined the crew and their progression towards that decision.

One small side note before we finish, but one of my favorite reveals from the Post Enies Lobby arc (if you know you know) was revealed in the first four episodes of this adaptation and it still annoys me. I get why they chose to include this reveal and this element in the story, but it’s too bad that one of my favorite reveals is going to be ruined for so many prospective One Piece fans. I’m not stupid enough to say you shouldn’t watch the show because of it, especially if you haven’t seen any One Piece, but it definitely makes recommending it sting just a little bit.

The main reason that this One Piece adaptation has succeeded, where so many others have failed, is because of the love and care that went into making it. These showrunners clearly wanted to honor what made the manga so great, and Oda’s involvement and collaboration with the showrunners is clearly evident.