Why I’m Excited for “The” One Piece Remake and Why You Should Be Too



There are a few creative projects that I am looking forward to with unbelievable anticipation whenever they arrive: The Batman Sequel, Beyond the Spider-verse, and of course, The One Piece. The One Piece, or the One Piece remake, while it’s being advertised with a small scope and scale, has the potential to be one of the best adaptations in the history of the medium, and that is only slightly hyperbolic. This project has a lot of good going for it, like the strength of One Piece as a source material, the studio behind the production, and most importantly, time. I do have concerns about the project and some of its goals, but I seriously think this project has so much going for it, and I want to talk about why.

 

Really, this all boils down to time. Time is a factor with many layers in the equation: This being the right time to release a One Piece remake, the time Wit Studio can take to work on the remake, and the time cadence at which the remake project can be released. So, let’s break all of that down. First up, this is the right time to release a One Piece remake. After the success of the live action, and maybe some executive’s child constantly whining to their parent about how little of One Piece is on their service, Netflix seems to be betting big on One Piece. They’ve added more movies, more episodes, and even including the newest episodes on a weekly basis, ultimately culminating in the announcement of this remake project which seems to be a Netflix exclusive. There’s no definitive graph I can show you that scientifically proves that now is the right time to release this project, so all I can say is that One Piece stocks are at an all-time high right now with the manga ramping up for its final saga, and a mainstream remake that gets way more people on board could not come out at a better time than now.


The manga is entering its final saga, and Toei has been trucking along with a consistent One Piece release schedule for 25 years now, but the Toei adaptation is a broken project that has been broken for a long time, and that all has to do with time, the time Toei takes to release new episodes and what that in turn has done to the pacing of the show. See, Toei has been adapting One Piece, a manga that has one chapter released weekly, into anime episodes, which typically adapt 2 to 3 chapters of a manga per anime episode. In order to keep at the weekly cadence, Toei turned to adapting a lot less material per episode, which results in a much slower pace for the show. It’s gotten so bad that One Piece fans have taken it upon themselves to reedit the Toei episodes to the regular pace of an anime, condensing an arc like DressRosa, which has 118 episodes (it was only 102 chapters in the manga), down to 48 episodes. A remake, being made by the Attack On Titan (Seasons 1-3) and Vinland Saga (Season 1) studio, with episodes releasing when they are ready and with plenty of runway to properly pace the episodes sounds basically like a dream come true. Really the only bad thing that  can ruin this dream scenario is the actual execution of the adaptation.


My only real concern with this remake (besides the use of AI (WIT please don’t use AI, I’m begging you I’d rather rewatch DressRosa including the recaps than see AI Luffy)) is the chance that my expectations pull an Eminem and snap back to reality. Right now, the remake is only advertising itself as a project to remake the opening saga of One Piece, which is One Piece’s first 100 chapters. So maybe the remake just stops there, but there was also an interview with someone at WIT studio where that spokesperson said that the remake was made for people that found the old aspect ratio of One Piece too intimidating. So wait, does this means that this remake is only going until Skypiea? Cause the aspect ratio changed somewhere around episode 205, right between the Skypiea Saga ending and Water Seven Enies Lobby saga beginning. My OCD hyper analyzing aside, I’m really curious about how this remake project pans out, and if they’ll stop somewhere, then pointing to the Toei adaptation, or if they’ll really just keep trucking along. Another small wait and see thing is how they handle the voice actors, since all these characters already have very particular iconic voices, but I don’t know if these actors honestly are going to still be working the entire time this remake project is going on if they really do plan on keeping this remake going. A lot of these voice actors signed on 25 years ago and I don’t think anyone expected to still be working this long and would understand them not wanting to sign up for work that would take over their retirement years. So yeah, to sum up all that weird rambling, a lot of this project is a big wait and see, which we shouldn’t have to wait much longer since One Piece Day is being celebrated literally within the next few days. We shall see…

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