Netflix
There are more than 1,000 episodes of the wildly popular Japanese anime series One Piece. I, however, have never seen a single one. Sure, over the years I’ve seen glimpses of the show’s lead character, a pirate boy named Monkey D. Luffy, in his iconic straw hat. But it never struck me to peer further, to take the plunge and figure out exactly what this show was all about. After all, watching 1,000 episodes and counting is incomprehensibly daunting. It’s far easier to say, “Look at that guy in his funny little hat!” and be on your merry way.
But like all immensely popular international media, it was only a matter of time before it was Americanized and spat out into a live-action remake on some streaming service. This time around, that streamer would be Netflix, which is home to the highly anticipated eight-episode first season of One Piece, premiering Aug. 31. Given the platform’s abysmal history with live-action anime adaptations—not to mention the massive fanbase and lore that One Piece has generated so far over its 24-year run—it would be easy to brush off Netflix’s take as a low-quality imitation, one that’s as money-hungry as its bands of vicious pirates.
It turns out that judging Netflix’s One Piece based on its past mistakes would be as much of a mistake as judging a pirate based on the title of his chosen occupation (something Luffy himself often suggests in the show). The series is a sprawling, elegant work, one that carefully crafts its world and characters so as to ease newcomers into the One Piece lore, while never losing the spirit of its original anime artform. Each episode is packed—sometimes too fully—with adventure and an invigorating amount of relatively graphic violence and horror. Though its writing sometimes struggles to find a steady middle ground between the tweenage and adult demographics it’s trying to appeal to, One Piece consistently surprises thanks to its massive scope that suggests there’s danger around every corner.