Netflix has gotten into a tremendous mess by making a live action series of ‘One Piece’. Without taking into account the history of the platform with this type of anime remakes, ‘One Piece’ is not exactly one of the series that lends itself best to this treatmentbetween Eiichiro Oda’s drawing style with his very particular aesthetic and above all for a series of crazy powers that without a very cutting-edge CGI may not look good on screen at all.
Still, Netflix has jumped into the pool and has been shooting its ‘One Piece’ series in style and has shown us some very promising little details. But if there were already some alarms raised, it seems that the ‘One Piece’ series is going to move away a little from the original material.
It is not just a carbon copy, but we are not very clear about what it is going to be
On the one hand, and taking into account that we have an anime as iconic as ‘One Piece’ engraved on the retina, it stands to reason that Netflix doesn’t want to photocopy as-is in the style of Disney’s live-action remakes. So as the director of photography has dropped Nicole Hirsch-Whitakerprecisely what they want is for ‘One Piece’ to be a series with its own identity without copying too much from the anime.
“There are always going to be fans and critics. You can’t please everyone, but speaking from the heart, the most important thing is the story. And if the story isn’t there, it’s not going to grab the readers and it doesn’t matter what you do.” Whittaker said. “We can only hope to catch a new audience and people who find it fascinating and interesting.”
For now Netflix seems to have spared no expense with ‘One Piece’, especially considering that it has built some massive sets with the Going Merry and other ships for the series. Already in the first glances we have seen some differences in style that logically have to be conceded when moving from animation to live action, but beyond aesthetics the worrying thing is that the series strays too far from ‘One Piece’ and everything that makes it special.
‘One Piece’ is not the easiest anime to go live, between the quirky and even ridiculous character designs and their overall aesthetic. already input the powers of Luffy or Buggy can be very regular with a bad CGI, but as the plot progresses we find more and more things that may not translate well outside of animation. So If part of these differences go through trying to make the general style of the series more “dark and realistic”, we would lose part of this flavor that characterizes ‘One Piece’ and we run the risk of being left with a generic series of dark fantasy for teenagers.
Secondly, the other big alarm we have is the possible changes in history. ‘Cowboy Bebop’ had quite a few successes with its cast and aesthetics (and watch out, Yes which was a series that lent itself to being live action) but it seems that they put the original anime in a blender and there were several significant changes in the rhythm and the way of approaching the story… With what the fear that with ‘One Piece’ do the same is too real.
Looking at the cast of the series, we have signed actors for Arlong and Garp, so it seems that this first season is going to want to air the East Blue saga in full. It’s not entirely impossible (especially with the fill and rhythm very calm) that the anime has at the beginning… but for a series of maybe 8 or 10 episodes it’s a lot of material to condense.
For now Netflix’s ‘One Piece’ has me quite nervous, because although it seems that those responsible understand the original material very well and are very fond of it and the actors seem very well sought after… Well, Netflix’s track record is that it’s pretty messy and not very hopeful.
But is that even if it was a spectacular series that lived up to all expectations, it’s still a terribly expensive projectand if we have Neil Gaiman begging for a renewal of ‘Sandman’, perhaps ‘One Piece’ would not survive the ax of cancellation and leave us with honey on our lips even before entering the Grand Line.