If you’ve always wanted to take a crack at the world’s favourite long-running pirate-themed anime, but balked at the prospect of hammering through (checks notes)… Jesus wept, 1074 episodes, we have excellent news for you. The brand-new live action version of One Piece has arrived in New Zealand and is now streaming exclusively on Netflix.
With a first season clocking in at a much more manageable eight episodes, One Piece follows the wacky adventures of wannabe pirate Luffy D. Monkey (Iñaki Godoy) on his quest to find the fabled One Piece treasure of former Pirate King Gold Roger (Michael Dorman), enabling him to snag the title for himself. What exactly that treasure is, no one has the faintest idea, but every pirate in the world is after it. And so, with his loyal crew, the Straw Hat Pirates on board, we proceed from there.
The whole thing takes place in an eclectic fantasy world populated by sword-swinging swashbucklers, dwarves, merfolk, magic, and monsters, not all of which may appear in this season (we’re going by the source material here). One Piece began in 1997 as a manga created by Eiichiro Oda, which is a) still going, and b) the most popular comic by a single author in the world.
Which means that squeezing all of One Piece’s disparate characters and concepts into a live action series without a budget comparable to a small nation’s GDP is a big ask, but we do know the Devil Fruit gets a look-in. This magical fruit grants anyone who eats it some kind of random power. In Monkey’s case, he’s a stretchy boy ala Mr Fantastic, more or less.
Co-starring Mackenyu Arata, Emily Rudd, Jacob Romero Gibson, and Taz Skylar, One Piece has already smashed Netflix records, becoming the #1 show in 84 countries on launch. Will you be jumping onboard? All else aside, it can’t be worse than Cowboy Bebop.
