Netflix’s One Piece

Man oh man, did I think I was going to just pretend this wasn’t happening. But unfortunately we live in a world where a One Piece live action is happening and there’s nothing we can do about it. Live action adaptations of anime have a pretty bad track record, I personally can’t think of a single good one, but I can think of several bad ones. When I heard how closely Oda was working with the project I had a little bit of hope but now… I’m not sure. Either way, let’s look at the things this trailer tells us.

First things first, we see a shot of the Going Merry, presumably being worked on or built at that point, and Luffy is aboard. I think the guy who plays Luffy looks fine, but it all looks a bit too much like a cosplay. I’m also curious – and this is just a small nitpick – if the strap on the straw hat is there from the very start or not, since I’m pretty confident Nami attaches that for him after Buggy steals the hat and damages it during their encounter. Also, if Buggy doesn’t sound like a dying seal in the first arc that’ll be disappointing, his voice actor is fantastic at portraying how unstable of a character he is.

Luffy tells us he wants to be the king of the pirates, the usual. We then get a nice shot of Luffy sitting in his iconic spot on the sheep head of the Going Merry while Baratie pans up in the background. Up until now I have zero complaints about this trailer if I’m honest. It looks about the way you’d expect and you can even see other ships next to the Baratie, which is a nice detail. I do wonder if the Baratie had that many floors in the manga, but it’s ultimately irrelevant. 

We move on to a lovely shot of a town with the big navy building where Luffy Meets Zoro central. I like the touch of blue in the building, it really makes it immediately recognizable. I feel like the ground around the fort was much more flat in the manga and anime but again, that’s just a difference from the source material and not a bad thing per se. We’re 21 seconds into a 103 second video and so far I have no real complaints. That’s a good start – especially for a live action adaptation.

Zoro is introduced and he looks about as edgy as you’d expect. I’m not sure I like the look of this fortress all that much, but I wonder if they should have given his hair a more muted color. It looks like a cosplay wig, and keep this comment in mind since we’ll get back to it later on. I’m not sure who the guy with the red mohawk is that is fighting Zoro. He’s not from one of the first arcs, maybe they’re introducing a different character for the story? I also can’t tell what island that is supposed to be. None of the early islands had bamboo forests like that as far as I know. Having said that, aesthetically that’s a pretty good scene. So far my biggest worry is that they’re going to be faithful to the manga in some places and go their own way in other players and they’re not making the right calls for which is which. I don’t think I like the fact that they’re sticking to very ‘anime’ hair colors. Make Nami a more natural redhead and give Zoro a darker green haircut and they look much more like real people.

Going back to my nitpick, it seems like Luffy has the strap on his hat before he meets Nami as he has it when he’s fighting the big sea monster. The CGI here looks fine, I have no issues with it. The pink ship we see next is Alvida’s I believe, and there’s even a barrel in the water which might be what Luffy is in at the start of the story. We don’t see Alvida here but we get a shot of Buggy the Clown on meth. Holy crap he looks so weird, I don’t like it. Buggy to me is a goofy character. He makes some very funny facial expressions and is one of the earliest characters to go completely wacky. His power also requires a wacky character, I think it would look far too eerie on a more psychotic clown. In the manga and anime he has no white face paint and although his lipstick goes past the lips, it looks very deliberately applied where he now just looks terrifying. 

Zoro and Nami’s bickering makes sense this early on but Luffy picking up on social cues??? That’s just weird to me. I hope I’m not insulting any actors, but Sanji looks older than the rest so far. The actor is 27 after a quick google and he does not pass for a teenager. Usopp on the other hand looks great. I was worried about him the most since he’s such a unique looking character but they’ve decided to not go with the nose and I think that was a great decision. Out of the cast so far I think he looks the most believable.

We then get a shot of Luffy’s Gomu Gomu no Pistol, which he even yells out definitely not sounding suspicious or anything. He fires it at, presumably Alvida, who instead of looking like an ugly old hag, is just some woman. Her entire thing is that she’s this large, unattractive woman but I feel like they didn’t want to go there, so they just made her look normal. But I had to go frame by frame to get a good look at her character, so it’s hard to say.

All things considered I don’t think this trailer looks terrible. I don’t think it’ll be good, but I have some level of hope. Just not a lot.
But maybe you disagree, I’ve definitely seen different opinions on the internet. I just think that the things that make One Piece so good don’t translate well to live action. It’s too goofy, but the goofiness works because of its format. That’s why it can get away with being goofy while talking about extremely sensitive topics like dictators, death, poverty, health care etc.

But yeah, let me know what you think of the trailer. I know I’m for sure going to watch the show, and I’ll let you know my thoughts when it comes out in late August. Until then, thanks for reading!