Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. The warm days of summer are currently ceding to chill winds and autumn leaves, which is normally a time of great existential terror for me, but I’ve frankly been so preoccupied by the day-to-day chaos of life that I can’t really bother to be scared about aging with nothing to show for it. Instead, I’ve been keeping busy with writing projects big and small, from breaking into the deliciously well-written It’s MyGO! to proofreading the last few quests of my DnD campaign. Also, the live action One Piece came out! My expectations were thoroughly muted after the disastrous live action Cowboy Bebop, but positive buzz and my abiding love for the material drew me back, and I’m happy to report that the live action One Piece is nearly as good as a live action One Piece could possibly be. What does that mean? I’m glad you asked!

So, the first, unavoidable complication of turning One Piece into a live action production is that the material is fundamentally ill-suited for it. This isn’t a problem exclusive to One Piece; basically any work of art that exploits its medium to the fullest extent will be made lesser in adaptation, because each medium has its own signature strengths that cannot be fully replicated in another. Great novels can create atmosphere through prose and characterization through interiority in ways that can’t be replicated by television or film; great works of animation can conjure drama through the vivid, imaginative movement of lines, an effect that has no parallel elsewhere. The more a work is fully at home in its original medium, the more any act of adaptation is bound to lose something of its essence.

As such, while you could probably make a perfectly reasonable live-action adaptation of something like, say, the familiar thriller templates and reserved aesthetic palette of Naoki Urusawa’s work, something like One Piece is fundamentally irreproducible outside of a comic book. Eiichiro Oda’s work delights in being a comic book, in the playful exaggeration of movement and diversity of character form afforded by drawing lines on a page. Beyond obvious points of difficulty like Luffy’s rubber man powers, so joyously realized in panels and so difficult to match through live action film, Oda’s mastery of visual comedy and panel timing are things even the anime often fails to replicate. Because One Piece is so naturally suited to being a comic book, and so deeply entrenched in all the things that comic books specifically can best express, it was always destined to lose a great deal in its translation to live-action drama.

One Piece’s showrunners are not oblivious to this fact; they understand perfectly well that One Piece’s strengths cannot all be directly transplanted into a live-action format. As such, while the show is brimming with details that speak to a sincere love for all the eccentricities of the original manga, it is primarily occupied with conveying the overall joyous, momentous spirit of One Piece, alongside faithful recreations of the most iconic and character-focused moments of the manga’s early material. And in this, it succeeds as well as any show commissioned by Netflix could be imagined to.

The production’s two top priorities seem to be “capture One Piece’s beloved characters within a propulsive one-season narrative” and “realize the amusement park texture of One Piece’s world through elaborate set design,” and it almost fully accomplishes both of these goals. The cast is undoubtedly this adaptation’s greatest strength; the casting director deserves all the raises for the discovery of Iñaki Godoy alone, who simply is Monkey D. Luffy. Luffy is driven by an enthusiasm that borders on mania, with his mixture of childlike curiosity and iron will at times feeling genuinely alien to human experience. Godoy and the marginally less guileless script bring this larger-than-life icon down to earth without losing a jot of his infectious enthusiasm, his overwhelming and near-instantaneous ability to inspire others. Casting a proper Luffy was one of the toughest challenges facing live-action One Piece, and with Godoy on board, that potential roadblock actually becomes one of the show’s greatest strengths.

The rest of the show’s casting is nearly as good. Emily Rudd in particular absolutely aces the contradictions and vast emotional range expressed by Nami, who has always been the most recognizably, richly human member of the Straw Hat crew. Nami’s story is what makes the East Blue memorable; with the naturally increased focus on team dynamics of a live action adaptation, her presence is often what drives the narrative on both a mechanical and emotional level. Rudd nails every thorny turn of that essential role, grounding the fanciful worldbuilding and bombastic melodrama in recognizably human yet still perfectly integrated reactions.

Though those are the two standouts, the rest of the casting is altogether excellent, with only Mackenyu’s Zoro sticking out as not quite nailing the assignment. He’s fine when it comes to action, and eventually builds a solid rapport with Godoy, but is simply a little too self-consciously cool to nail Zoro’s often comical presence. That said, the material of this first season doesn’t actually give him too many opportunities to express Zoro’s off-kilter range – I can accept that Zoro is a role you have to grow into, particularly since his dynamic improves the moment Sanji enters the crew.

Of course, all the great casting and sumptuous physical sets in the world couldn’t save this adaptation if it didn’t have faith in the material it was adapting. Thankfully, that’s not the case. Having emerged into the sun after long, cold years of suffering under obnoxiously self-aware, drama-deflating dialogue, the live action One Piece is proud to be a cartoon brought to life, with all the inexplicable weirdness that entails. Garp wears a goofy bulldog hat, villains dress in preposterous cat-themed ensembles, snails are phones, and absolutely no one says “so yeah, I guess that just happened.”

While isolated individual lines can stray towards a winking insincerity regarding the gleeful strangeness of Oda’s wonderland, the world at large embraces whatever quirks may come with passion and sincerity, allowing the creativity of this world to enhance the majesty of its drama just as in the original comic. More than utter faithfulness to the source material, it is belief in the validity of that source material’s style that most essentially needed to be maintained, and I am happy to report that live action One Piece believes in this story and style with its whole heart.

In fact, live action One Piece is so recognizably One Piece that I often found myself admiring the intelligence of the show’s changes to the material. In many ways, this adaptation demonstrates the cruciality of editing with your entire narrative’s structure in mind, something the original manga’s weekly release schedule makes impossible. The early introduction and general prominence of Vice-Admiral Garp both gives this season a sense of genuine momentum (something altogether lacking in the freewheeling original manga), and also simply makes more sense than his sudden appearance way down near the end of Water 7. It’s a change made with an understanding of this whole manga’s structure, in contrast to Oda simply cooking up the entire next act of the manga as Enies’ Lobby proceeds.

Other changes similarly work to both organize a hundred chapters into an eight hour miniseries and also clarify the stakes and structures of One Piece’s world. Mihawk’s interactions with Garp seed Luffy’s significance more clearly than anything in the original East Blue; Arlong’s richer characterization could only be realized in the wake of Fishman Island, while further emphasizing the inherent injustices of the marines’ world order. Don Krieg is reduced to a single scene, all for the better: Don Krieg was likely the weakest element of all the East Blue, and his presence is not missed. Changes are never made to diminish the absorbing strangeness of Oda’s masterpiece; they are done to focus, clarify, and seed both narrative and thematic threads, all with an eye for an astonishingly ambitious long-term adaptation.

There are pitfalls, I am sad to say. While the production’s sets are magnificent, the cinematography often fails to do them justice. The show has a bizarre trend of defaulting to head-on fisheye shots from right in front of the characters’ faces, which is presumably done to echo the look of manga panels, but which only feels distracting in the context of live-action drama. Between the uninspired camerawork, awkwardly short depth of field, and often unconvincing lighting, the show has a tendency to look much cheaper than its staggering price tag should warrant. Episodes of One Piece were apparently more expensive than episodes of Game of Thrones, but they certainly don’t look it; there is a lack of tactility in both the shooting and costume design that makes it clear you are always watching a stage play, not a universe you could visually lose yourself in.

And of course, Luffy’s gum-gum powers would defy even the bravest attempts at live-action adaptation, entrenched as they are so completely in what comic books and only comic books can do. Luffy is a celebration of the impact of single panels, a demonstration of how energy can be conveyed even in still lines, and this adaptation wisely chooses to adapt around Luffy’s powers whenever possible. The CG employed for his abilities is as passable as you tend to get for live-action superheroes, but no more than that – and in its attempts to replicate the impact of Luffy’s most iconic moments, it can occasionally feel like Godoy himself is freezing for an invisible camera, rather than moving with the vivid enthusiasm that otherwise characterizes his performance.

So, as I said, about as good as a live action adaptation was ever going to be. Outside of the limp cinematography, all of this production’s limitations are borne of its fundamentally impossible assignment, while its strengths are charming and numerous. One Piece is brilliantly cast, smartly condensed, and absolutely overflowing with love for its source material, thereby capturing this story’s allure as well as any live action adaptation could hope to. A fun experiment that I’ll happily follow to its end, and if it leads audiences either back to Oda’s masterpiece or onward to other works of such fantastical sincerity, then we are all richer for it.