During the Netflix Festival at Brazil they unveiled bunch of new trailers for their top shows among these was the first trailer for the One Piece Live Action series, which we are going to be discussing about today
One Piece chronicles the epic journey of Monkey D. Luffy (portrayed by Iñaki Godoy), a determined young pirate captain yearning to navigate the treacherous waters of the Grand Line in pursuit of the legendary treasure known as One Piece. Accomplishing this feat requires Luffy to gather a formidable crew of pirates, including the cunning Nami (played by Emily Rudd), the skilled swordsman Roronoa Zoro (portrayed by Mackenyu), the talented chef Sanji (embodied by Taz Skyler), and the resourceful Usopp (portrayed by Jacob Gibson). Moreover, the series showcases the esteemed actor Peter Gadiot in the role of Shanks.
One of the surprises for me was that this is going to already premiere August 31th and it will have 8 episodes in total. It goes without saying that Live action series will have much faster pacing and will likely skip lot of material or crunch it together. I’m also expecting the episodes to be quite long instead of 25 minutes they are likely to be 50-62 minutes long by average. Outside from Zoros introduction i think things like Usopp joining the party will be very brief and perhaps different from how its done in manga.
UPDATE: Read Our Review here
It would be impossibility to adapt One Piece completely given how much episodes the anime itself has, even excluding the filler arcs and breaking episodes in half still would be too many, so in order to have a logical execution this is the best way to deal with, question is what things will get cut in terms of major characters and how does that impact grand scheme of things.
So Does it Look Good or Bad?
Artistically One Piece is very distinguished in its designs and places, its fundamentally quite hard to translate this stuff over to Live action so you gotta be realistic about what can be achieved. Funnily there isn’t exactly that much CGI shown here and most of the stuff seems actually very natural and grounded outside from the Sea Beast that’s shown in the beginning. Here are couple of points i want to discuss though.
- The main cast actually looks very good and close to the real ages in the Anime/Manga and don’t come off as some Cosplay Larpers from Comic-con, some outfits you see are slightly altered and still look pretty neat while staying faithful to original designs.
- I’m not super sold on Inaki’s Luffy performance, its slightly cringe on its dialogue, Luffy actually doesn’t talk that much when you think about it. The Gum Gum pistol scene is likely the lowpoint of the trailer and there seems to be an indication that the characters won’t be saying their abilities out loud – but i do hope Luffy will when he uses Gear Second for first time.
- The Combat scenes we don’t see much of that here, bit of swordplay from zoro that seems bit too slow for my taste
- Comedy here is lot more Nihilistic and Sarcastic in style, which is quite far departure from whats it like in the Anime. I’m not sure how i feel about this in the long run but we have to wait and see
- Need to see more of Sanji and Usopp to kinda feel them out more and how they pan out, because they look slightly more far off from their designs
To stress again have to see at least another trailer to get a rough idea what is the balance of CGI in this series and how all the Gomu Gomu No Mi moves are executed in the live action screen. Jeez will they have the budget to animate chopper on every episode?
So Where will Season 1 Finish?
While i did say in the video that we’re probably gonna be seeing Chopper in the ending scene of season one, i have to walk back on that, because that doesn’t add up (it’s been too long when i revisited the earlier arcs). I Think Mihawk will be the final boss of the season or he will be the actual cliffhanger where the season actually ends, its hard to think this in absolute chronological order because they have to fundamentally change things around a lot.
Looking at Sanji’s & Nami’s actors for example i can definitely see that they were extremely dedicated for these roles and for their sake and people who created these amazing sets, i hope they are going to get this show running for two seasons at least. It goes without saying this is so expensive series to do, because filming at sea locations or at sea is just so expensive thing to do logistically.
We are obviously going to give out our own breakdown of the series at Putachi and give our honest review when its time, on a last note i want to say that the Netflix concept of dropping whole season at once is bad concept for a series like this. I rather have two episodes dropping out daily or something else that spread it out more through the weeks and months.
