One Piece (TV Program)

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    Netflix’s ‘One Piece’ Shines Brightest With Its Casting

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    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.Godoy as Monkey D. Luffy in “One Piece.”NetflixGood 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.)Monkey D. Luffy in a scene from the anime series “One Piece,” created by Eiichiro Oda.Shueisha/Toei AnimationThe 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. More

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      ‘One Piece’ Review: Netflix Tries to Translate the Anime Magic (Again)

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      Remember the live-action, English-language “Cowboy Bebop”?With “One Piece,” Netflix repeats history, and there isn’t much evidence that it paid attention to what happened the first time around.“Cowboy Bebop” was a cult-favorite Japanese animated series that fetishized cool American jazz and film noir and Hollywood westerns, and in 2021 Netflix returned the cultural homage by making an American live-action adaptation. It wasn’t a disaster, but it quickly fell from sight.“One Piece” is a remarkably endurable manga and anime franchise — more than 500 million books sold, 1,073 television episodes and counting — that applies a slapstick, Buster Keaton-like visual energy to an adventure story with roots in Hollywood swashbucklers and musicals like “Captain Blood” and “The Crimson Pirate.” So once again Netflix has been moved to produce an American live-action remake, whose eight episodes premiered on Thursday.The original “Cowboy Bebop” and “One Piece” are very different creatures, but they have something important in common: They are propelled by style. Texture, composition, sound and movement engage us and trigger our emotions; the moody revenge plot of “Bebop” and the rousingly affirmative coming-of-age story of “One Piece” are just serviceable scaffoldings.There’s no reason a live-action version of either anime couldn’t find its own distinctive style. But neither of these shows managed it; if anything, they seem to have avoided the attempt. To an even greater extent than the Netflix “Cowboy Bebop,” the Netflix “One Piece” feels bland and generic. It may satisfy fans of the original who are happy to see events more or less faithfully replicated, but most of the verve and personality of the anime are gone, replaced by busyness, elaborate but uninteresting production design and — a sign of the times — an increased piety regarding the story’s themes of knowing and believing in yourself.Set in a fantastical world made up mostly of ocean and patrolled by colorfully named pirate crews, some of them made up of fish-men, “One Piece” centers on a young wannabe pirate named Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy). Pursuing his childhood dream of becoming king of the pirates and finding a perhaps mythical treasure called the One Piece, he gradually gathers a crew of young misfits like himself, with unhappy pasts and missions that define them: to be the world’s greatest swordsman, or to locate a (perhaps mythical) seafood paradise.From left, Emily Rudd, Iñaki Godoy and Mackenyu form part of a crew of misfits driven by personal missions.NetflixIn addition to unnaturally high spirits and an utter refusal to take no for an answer, Luffy is defined by his ability to stretch his limbs across long distances (handy when throwing punches) and to absorb punishment, the results of eating a forbidden fruit that made his body rubberlike. This bit of comic inspiration by the character’s creator, the Japanese artist Eiichiro Oda, makes Luffy physically and psychologically congruent — he is elastic and indestructible in every way.The series does a more than creditable job of recreating Luffy’s rubbery abilities, and Godoy (a Mexican actor who appeared in the Netflix series “Who Killed Sara?” and “The Imperfects”) is a decent match with the animated character in look and temperament.But there’s not much beyond that for him to play, and the same goes for the rest of the cast, which includes capable performers like Mackenyu as the swordsman, Roronoa Zoro, and Taz Skylar as the piratical chef, Sanji. Depth of writing isn’t make or break amid the carnival atmosphere of the anime, delivered in 20-minute dollops of sensation, but the thinness of the characterizations becomes much harder to ignore in the more deliberate, more ordinary Netflix telling, with the story reshaped into hourlong episodes.That reshaping — the eight episodes correspond to roughly the first 45 episodes of the anime — was surely a major effort, and it would be understandable if there wasn’t a lot of time or energy left over for actually reimagining the material for live actors and constructed sets. The show’s developers and showrunners, Matt Owens and Steven Maeda, were able to wrestle the story to a draw. But they don’t capture the corny, goofy spirit of the anime, and without that the generalities about living your dream and making way for a new generation just sit there gathering dust.The fates of “One Piece” and “Cowboy Bebop” are, perhaps, a likely consequence of big-box streaming. Taking a show that has found a fanatical following and remaking it with the widest possible audience in mind means making it for no particular viewer at all. More

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      ‘One Piece’ Creator Hopes Live-Action Series Will Defy ‘a History of Failure’

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      On Thursday, an eight-part adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s pirate comedy-adventure “One Piece” will make its Netflix debut. The stakes are high: Millions of fans want to see if the showrunners, Matt Owens and Steven Maeda (whom Oda describes as “‘One Piece’ superfans”), succeeded in converting the beloved manga and anime series to live-action. Although some viewers over 30 may not recognize the title, “One Piece” is one of the most popular entertainment franchises in the world.Since July 1997, when it began appearing in the Japanese manga magazine Weekly Shonen Jump, “One Piece” collections have sold more than 516 million copies worldwide. An animated TV series notched its 1,000th episode earlier this year, and there have been numerous TV specials, light novels and video games; fans discuss “One Piece” trivia on countless websites. The 15th theatrical feature, “One Piece Film: Red,” was the No. 1 box-office hit in Japan in 2022, outdrawing “Top Gun: Maverick.”Netflix held the fan screening in Santa Monica, Calif. The “One Piece” franchise is enormously popular, with more than 516 million books sold and numerous anime series and movies released.Yuri Hasegawa for The New York TimesOda is extremely private — he does not allow his face to be photographed, if he can help it — but he talked about “One Piece” in a rare interview from Los Angeles. Speaking through the interpreter Taro Goto, he discussed the origins of “One Piece,” casting its hero for TV, and the film that changed his mind about live-action adaptation. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When it comes to adapting a phenomenally popular manga and anime series like “One Piece” to live action, what do you have to keep in mind?A live-action adaptation of a manga doesn’t simply re-enact the source material on a one-to-one basis: It involves really thinking about what fans love about the characters, the dynamics among them — and being faithful to those elements. A good live-action show doesn’t have to change the story too much. The most important thing is whether the actors can reproduce the characters in a way that will satisfy the people who read the manga. I think we did it well, so I hope audiences will accept it.Colton Osorio, left, and Peter Gadiot in “One Piece,” premiering Thursday on Netflix.NetflixYou’ve said you wanted to be a manga artist since you were in elementary school. How did “One Piece” begin?I set out to draw the manga I wanted to read when I was young. When I started, I had to draw things that didn’t exist to get attention. There were plenty of heroes who fight the demons and save the world; the market was saturated with that kind of story. I wanted to do something different but relatable. I understood that I had been supported and helped by a lot of people to get to where I was, so friendship became a central theme.The hero of the story is Monkey D. Luffy (it rhymes, appropriately, with “goofy”), who is determined to become King of the Pirates by finding a fabulous treasure known as the One Piece. Luffy is warmhearted, upbeat and ferociously devoted to his friends, but he’s no matinee idol. How did you design him?I knew I wanted to write a pirate manga, and just drew from instinct the kind of young boy I imagined in the role. As the adventure continued, I realized that various kinds of pirates would appear, so I decided to give Luffy a face that would be very easy to draw. Later, when I had to give autographs and needed to sketch Luffy, it was easy to do.“One Piece” includes strong female characters like Nami, played in the series by Emily Rudd. (With Mackenyu Arata, center, and Iñaki Godoy.)NetflixSomething that sets “One Piece” apart from many adventure manga is the powerful, capable women in the story, including the archaeologist Robin and Nami, the navigator.There are many strong women in the world of “One Piece” — women with intelligence like Robin, or with abilities like Nami. There are even attractive and strong women among the enemy pirates. In the manga I read as a kid, there was always a point where the heroine existed just to be rescued. That didn’t sit well with me; I didn’t want to create a story about women being kidnapped and saved. I depict women who know how to fight for themselves and don’t need to be saved. If a moment comes where they’re overpowered, their shipmates will help them out, and vice versa.As a boy, Luffy ate the accursed gum-gum fruit and it turned his body into rubber, allowing him to deliver fantastic stretchy kicks and punches in fights. Isn’t he better suited to animation than to live action?When I first started, I didn’t think there was any point in drawing a manga that could be remade in live-action. But when I saw the movie “Shaolin Soccer,” it felt like a manga-esque world brought to life. I changed my mind. I realized times had changed, and there was technology available that could make a live-action “One Piece” happen. So I shifted to finding the right partner to bring the manga to life.Actors have portrayed Luffy and his crew in stage shows and even in a Kabuki play. But attempts to adapt popular anime into American live-action movies and series have generally been unsuccessful, as in the widely panned “Ghost in the Shell” (2017) and the short-lived “Cowboy Bebop” (2021). Did that worry you?Various manga had been made into live action, but there was a history of failure; no one in Japan could name a successful example. Would fans of “One Piece” — and viewers who don’t know the manga — accept it? Perhaps it was time to search for the answer. Thankfully, Netflix agreed that they wouldn’t go out with the show until I agreed it was satisfactory. I read the scripts, gave notes and acted as a guard dog to ensure the material was being adapted in the correct way.Oda said casting Luffy was the biggest challenge. “I didn’t expect to find anyone quite like Iñaki Godoy,” he said.NetflixLuffy is not the brightest doubloon in the dead man’s chest, but he’s an endearing character: He’s impulsive and happy-go-lucky until some villain threatens his friends or menaces someone weaker — then it’s a fight to the finish. Was he difficult to cast?I thought the biggest challenge was going to be finding somebody to play Luffy — I didn’t expect to find anyone quite like Iñaki Godoy. When I first created Luffy, I drew the most energetic child I could imagine: a normal child on the outside, but not at all normal on the inside. Iñaki was just like the person I drew; he felt absolutely natural. Before I saw the first cut of the show, a lot of my notes were based on how the manga Luffy would act. But after seeing Iñaki’s performance, I was able to shift gears and give notes on how the live-action Luffy should act.The live-action “One Piece” uses more extensive dialogue than the manga or the animated series, which focus more on the visuals.In a manga, the more dialogue you put in, the less space you have to draw, so I cut the words as much as possible. But when people actually talk, the conversations are different. In live-action dramas, there’s always a lot of dialogue. If the characters spoke in real life, their speeches would have the natural feel that’s in the scripts. I’m very happy about how that turned out.Over the last 26 years, you’ve drawn thousands of pages of the manga as well as magazine covers, book covers and posters. You still draw in ink on paper; have you ever considered switching to digital?Everyone is drawing digitally now and it’s not that I’m not interested in it, but for some reason readers tend to take that work a little lightly. I enjoy the experience of drawing by hand, and I expect I’ll continue using hand drawing for the duration of “One Piece.”You’ve spoken with enthusiasm about the possibility of a second season of the live-action series, and “One Piece” collections continue to appear on best-seller lists around the world. When you started Luffy’s saga back in 1997, did you ever imagine it would run for more than 25 years?I never thought “One Piece” would last this long: When I began, I imagined it might run for five years. But it was my first time doing something serialized, and I found that as I kept writing, the characters took on lives of their own. Before I knew it, they were writing the story for me, and it just kept going. More