Netflix has released the One Piece live-action adaptation. The adaptation and manga show that One Piece is best as a longer story.
Over the years, the full scope of the One Piece story has emerged like a never-ending serpentine sea monster. While not the longest manga ever made, it is, by all reasonable measures, an absurdly long story. Creator Eiichiro Oda started publishing the series in 1997 and it’s still getting new chapters to this day. As it stands now, the manga has over 1,000 chapters, and the anime series similarly has over 1,000 episodes. Now, the Netflix live-action adaptation must face this monster of a story and make it its own.
The live-action series starts at the beginning of the original source material. We meet Luffy at the beginning of his journey as he sets sail for the first time and ventures to build a pirate crew of his own. While staying true to the largest beats of the manga, the showrunners took significant liberty to shorten the original story. It condenses roughly 100 chapters or 45 episodes (roughly 1,085 minutes of the anime) into one season of television. Although I’m glad I don’t have to trudge through hours of television to revisit the story, the adaptation shows that One Piece is a slow-burn story at its heart.
One Piece follows a boy named Luffy and his journey to become the greatest pirate in the world. Finding new shipmates presents an especially large challenge in the early stages of the series, because Luffy starts his journey alone. To this end, the original series regularly follows the same general story structure: Luffy asks a character to join his crew, they say no, and he fights for them until they join in earnest. This format allows Oda to establish the motivations of a character clearly, and contributes to this larger feeling that every crew member’s loyalty is hard-earned — and thus fit to play a major role in a 25-year-long saga.
