Series Kung-Fu Hustle Pirates edition.
I can’t do this unbiasedly, I discovered the One Piece manga in high school and have loved it ever since and learning Netflix was gonna make a live-action series after the Cowboy Bebop and Resident Evil shows my expectations were at rock bottom. Not to mention other anime live action adaptations like Dragon Ball Evolution.
So whoever reads this, believe me this show is actually pretty damn good. No it can’t really replicate the source material visually (bye-bye long nose and eyebrow) but like the best adaptations it still understands what people about like the series. Though Oda himself doing some rewrites might’ve had something to do with it.
The cast, particularly the five shine and keep the show together. Iñaki Godoy's Luffy had probably the hardest task and I feared it would be like live-action Ed but he struck a great balance of Jack Sparrow’s charm and Peter Pan energy and is a delight to watch. Mackenyu's Zoro looks, sounds and fights the part even if I found his edginess a little try hard and distracting at times. Emily Rudd’s Nami I liken to MCU Black Widow in that she has to bring a bodacious femme fatale to life but adds realism to it, she reacts in annoyance to flirtation rather than going along with it. Jacob Gibso's Usopp while I know people will make “cowardly black guy stereotype” accusations was fun, cool and heartfelt with his Kaya stuff. Taz Skylar's Sanji though distracting to see both eyes was legitimately cool and charismatic, I know they had to tone down the horniness but the character’s loser qualities contrasted with his badassery is what makes him my favourite character.
The pacing was alright for the first half but did feel choppy around the Baratie, the omission of the Don Krieg arc with Gin just tacked on, was painful as that was the first arc I read in the library at high school. The choreography was awesome even if some of the effects and costumes were ropey (*cough* fishmen). Buggy being a hot topic Joker took something getting used to. Garp, Zeff, Shanks and Mihawk were fantastic though. Overall I’m excited to see how far they can go with this.
Series Non-Practising Piracy
I've previously claimed that adaptations of anime always suffer, because a) a lot of cartoon stuff simply doesn't translate into live action very well, and b) the fans demand you have it in there anyway, no matter how bad it will end up looking. Having heard that Netflix's One Piece is the "show that did it right", or "the show has beat the anime adaptation curse", it has gotten my attention.
One Piece is set in a Universe where everyone is a pirate, and yet everyone operates on the vaguest definition of that word. We get pirates who are circus clowns, cat butlers, and goddamn fish people, and none of them seem to do any actual plundering. Our main character is at one point derisively asked, "what sort of pirate are you?!", implying there is some sort of convention all these other guys had been following.
Our protagonist, by the way, is Luffy, a hyper-optimistic lad with special powers, who wants to make his name pursuing the greatest treasure hunt known to man. For that he needs a ship and a motley crew, which is how we spend our first 8 episodes. I've not read the manga and I only ever watched the first dozen episodes of the anime, giving up on the discovery there was another thousand left to go. Thankfully, Netflix's adaptation is a shorter order.
The appeal of the anime was its wacky, colourful, gonzo characters. The adaptation makes an honest attempt to reflect the utterly ridiculous character designs, and this presents the first major hurdle for audiences. A lot of people will take one look at the boy with a rubber body, the talking snail phone, and the metal mouthed police chief with a shitty axe hand, say "this looks terrible!" and give up. That's understandable, stuff that looks cool in an anime often does look really stupid in real life, and One Piece is far from an exception. But the show tries to take ownership of how cheesy this all looks, going for a tongue-in-cheek approach, and I welcome that.
Where the show falls down is that it also borrows the bad bits from the anime too. For instance, the bad guy de jour has a tendency to monologue constantly, threatening the hero for what feels like 30 minutes per episode; Netflix gets one point for faithfulness, negative ten for being boring in that respect. The other issue is that whereas One Piece was written for 10 year olds, Netflix chooses to marry the kid friendly stories with adult gore and swearing. It's not a very natural juxtaposition.
All this to say One Piece is a mixed bag. I can't say if coming to it as a fan of the manga or anime makes a difference, but the deftly choreographed fight scenes and silly aesthetic was enough for me, and that's what kept me interested until the end.