Netflix’s breakout global hit does right by its characters by getting actors who capture the spirit of the original.
When Iñaki Godoy smiles as Monkey D. Luffy in Netflix’s live-action adaptation of the beloved anime “One Piece,” his face broadens and brightens and his eyes pop with boyish delight. No combination of physical attributes and fancy effects could replicate Luffy’s doofy 2D ear-to-ear half-moon grin in the animated original. But Godoy gets pretty damn close.
Say what you will about the show overall (I’d say it’s a perfectly tolerable reimagining of an overrated series), “One Piece” excels at capturing the spirit of the original, primarily through the depictions of its motley crew of pirate-protagonists in a quest for a treasure called the One Piece. This success is indicative of a wider trend that might help anime fans — who’ve been traumatized with years of godawful adaptations of their favorite series — sleep better at night. Recent live-action anime adaptations like “One Piece” are slowly but surely improving the genre, and it all starts with casting.
Emily Rudd, who plays Nami, a cunning thief who hates pirates yet still joins Luffy’s crew, channels the wit and relentlessness of the original character — with more bite. Mackenyu Arata, as the cantankerous, heavy-drinking swordsman Roronoa Zoro, masters the fighter’s disaffected glare and confidence, while also pulling off the identical bang-arrangement of his animated counterpart’s green hair. (Mackenyu’s emerald mane isn’t quite the same shade as Zoro’s mint ’do, but potato-potahto.) Jacob Romero Gibson brings emotional grounding to the silly pathological liar Usopp, and Taz Skylar, who had no martial arts training before filming, performed all of his own kicks as the flirtatious cook Sanji.
Good casting in live-action anime adaptations shouldn’t be taken for granted; in fact, it’s been the reason that several have crashed and burned. The most notorious example may be the “Ghost in the Shell” film from 2017, starring Scarlett Johansson as a whitewashed version of the protagonist, Major Motoko Kusanagi. But that casting flub was about more than just skin color; the choice was an erasure of a foundational element of the original, in which the character, setting and philosophy are all based in East Asian culture and ideas. And there have been many others: “Dragonball: Evolution,” “The Last Airbender” and Netflix’s 2017 “Death Note” film. In each movie, the casting revealed how the adaptation only showed a cursory understanding of the context around the original series.
Totally reinterpreting the characters or opting for unconventional casting can be especially problematic in shonen (the popular, typically mainstream anime targeted toward young boys, e.g., “One Piece,” “Dragonball,” “Naruto,” “Pokémon”). These series, which often feature fantastical lands, repetitive arcs and steadily escalating boss battles, are ultimately centered around the colorful protagonists and their sense of kinship and camaraderie.
Netflix’s last big anime adaptation, “Cowboy Bebop,” made several missteps, but the show’s lead cast was not one of them. John Cho, Mustafa Shakir and Daniella Pineda not only embodied their characters aesthetically — as in Cho’s impressive coiffure matching Spike’s mad mop of hair — but also in the way they spoke and even walked. (Just look at Cho sauntering through the dusty western-style towns in space.)
The bungled anime adaptations represent an unfortunate hangup of American studios and creators: distrust that these stories can translate unless they’re westernized. Settings change. Characters’ back stories are altered. Recurring jokes, anime tropes and cultural references are lost for being too inside-baseball for an American audience. The result, like “Cowboy Bebop,” is too often a perverted version of the anime, both too distant from the original story and too literal an approximation of an animated medium whose visual style and humor become cheesy when brought to life.
The hopeful view is that “One Piece” is marking a change in the tide — yes, ocean pun intended — for American adaptations. Netflix in particular is trying to reach anime fans with an impressive list of live-action adaptations slated for the future: “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” a new “Death Note,” “Yu Yu Hakusho,” “My Hero Academia” and, of course, more “One Piece,” after the show rose to the top of Netflix’s charts immediately upon its release.
Perhaps by the time the straw hat pirates return in Season 2 there will be more good adaptations to speak of, not just in terms of casting but in the writing, filming, world-building and everything else that brought fans to the original series in the first place. If not — well, there’s about a century worth of cute, horrifying, sad, funny, surreal anime to watch out there. Take your pick.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
