In simply accepting these small yet crucial oddities, Netflix’s One Piece proves its willingness to hold on to what makes the original property so fantastic. (Take a minute out of your day to witness it.) If that isn’t cute enough, the snails also make a trilling kind of dialing noise ( purupurupuru) that builds to a staccato statement that sounds like gotcha. The snails have accessories to match the person who owns them for Garp’s, that includes some white facial hair and a dashing ivory-and-navy coat. To the credit of showrunners Matt Owens and Steven Maeda, this One Piece embraces the strangeness of an idea born in the manga and refrains from overexplaining anything. In the live-action adaptation, we first see a snail transponder on the desk of the vice–grand admiral of the Navy, Garp (Vincent Regan), as he makes a call to the gargantuan sword-wielding pirate Mihawk (Steven John Ward). They’re living, breathing, eating telephones that facilitate telepathic conversations over far distances. In One Piece, snails - some palm-size, others as big as a small cat - are used for communication, surveillance, and sometimes even projection. The live-action effect is difficult to pull off, even in a fantastical story as heightened as this one. As a result, Luffy is able to stretch and move like rubber, bouncing bullets off himself and committing great feats of strength that defy his lanky frame - like a Looney Tunes character brought into the realm of flesh, blood, and gravity. Just as crucially, he has eaten a particularly rare and important Devil Fruit - a melon-size purple-and-green food rippling with texture - that gives the eater their own unique power set. He isn’t imagining riches for himself but a better society. This is not your average hero’s tale but something more emotionally rich: Luffy desires to liberate those subjugated by the World Government and assemble a crew that functions as a family. Luffy (played as an adult by Iñaki Godoy) to, years later, become King of the Pirates and capture the One Piece. His request inspires the sweet-natured Monkey D. When the infamous pirate Gold Roger is taken into custody and condemned to death by the World Government and their militaristic Navy, he commands those in the audience of his state-sanctioned murder to find the infamous treasure that gives this story its name. There is much to consider in adapting a setting so radically different from our own, but one question bubbled up just before I hit play on one of Netflix’s most expensive shows to date: What are they going to do with the snails?įans will understand my concern, and others will need a primer: One Piece the anime comprises more than a thousand episodes and counting, and the live-action version leans immediately into the giddy, adventurous nature of its predecessor. It is a world in which the physics that control the human body are outright broken, in which characters naturally have hair the color of sea moss and glinting sapphires, in which skyscraper-size dragons double as warlords, in which friendship is more explored than romance, in which the globe is swallowed by the ocean. One Piece takes place in a seafaring universe of pirates, monsters, and fish-men. It’s exactly the kind of anime that seems impossible to translate into the hard-edged live-action storytelling that dominates America’s mainstream film and TV. One Piece - the long-running manga and ongoing anime from the mind of Eiichiro Oda - is a joyfully weird, ecstatically singular masterpiece politically bent toward liberation and care. Photo: Courtesy of Netflix/COURTESY OF NETFLIX Netflix adapts Eiichiro Oda’s epic, silly, radical anime in live action and manages the impossible: It works.
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