Netflix One Piece (2023) (2 Viewers)

[DaveF]

ONE PIECE

With his straw hat and ragtag crew, young pirate Monkey D. Luffy goes on an epic voyage for treasure in this live-action adaptation of the popular manga.

www.themoviedb.org

One Piece is Ted Lasso for manga teens.

Monkey D Luffy's dream is to find the hidden “one piece” treasure left behind by Gold Roger and becoming the King of Pirates. The only problem is he has no crew, no ship, no experience pirating and his is an ocean world filled with pirates, all hunted by the One World Government’s Marines. But Luffy is undaunted by such details.

As he pursues his goal, he assembles his misfit crew, finding other young adults, with their own dreams, often stunted and no way to achieve them. Luffy encourages every one to pursue their own dream, to not be told how to live their lives by anyone else, even if their dream is in conflict with his own.

In this, One Piece completely surprised me: it's the tale of a inexperienced unexpected leader who works towards his goals by helping everyone around him become the best they can be. It's very much of the modern "people becoming better people" vibe. It's Manga Ted Lasso. Except, with pirates.

The target audience for One Piece is manga-loving teens, by my estimation. Its sophistication and nuance is at that level. I'm not the key audience for One Piece. And I can't say I loved it. It's fine. But it's more than fine. I binged it over two days of traveling and thoroughly enjoyed One Piece. It's delightful. It makes feel good and has great Stranger Things loyalty-to-friends vibes.

And it's always surprising. The Devil Fruit that gives Luffy his super stretchy powers. Cooks Pirates. Every episode has fun karate-movie, wire-fu fight scenes blended with silly FX. The nigh-invulnerable Fish Men. The world gets bigger, and stranger, and sillier, and more complicated every episode.

It's not perfect, or I should say, it's not completely rigorous in its creation and execution of this superhero-esque pirate world. People are as strong as they need to be to for the immediate story needs. A character will be incredibly powerful in one scene, and unable to do something seemingly doable by any normal teenager. There are some visual cheats where a character takes some action that is revealed as a surprise, but the setup wasn't in the preceding moments. The theme is very much '80s high school "don't let parents tell you how to live your life or pursue your dreams". And the dreams are piratical. If you want to be a literalist, One Piece is encouraging kids to pursue violent passions.

But it's not. Not really. One Piece isn't a deep show. The silliness and violent framings are a thin veneer to core perspective of follow your dreams, do it with grace, and help others do the same.

 

[Sean Bryan]

I thought this was a lot of fun.

 

[Edwin-S]

I was surprised at how well this live adaptation managed to turn out. I was sure it was going to be an unmitigated disaster, considering how wildly over-the-top the characters are in the anime.

There was bound to be a lot lost with six 40 minute episodes boiling down an opening story that took dozens of episodes of the anime to cover. Development of the characters does get reduced in the live action version, especially Usop, who really does have his character development and motivations nearly completely ignored.

Still, it is nothing short of a miracle that a live action adaptation of a manga/anime series as wild as ONE PIECE managed to turn out as well as it did for its opening tranche. The anime of this story has over 1000 twenty to thirty minute episodes telling the story and isn't finished yet; although, to be accurate, a good chunk of those were filler as the animators had to wait for Oda, the creator of the manga, to supply the next part of the main story.

He was also involved in the making of the live series and I think it shows his influence in that the show managed to avoid being a cheesy kind of series like the various Power Ranger shows that have been made.