So, goddamn Wano, huh? It turns out I caught up on One Piece at an exceptionally good time. Over the past several years, the team at Toei have endeavored to make One Piece’s latest arc a landmark in the genre, a towering feat of animation offering film-tier feats of fluidity and scale on a nearly weekly basis. From the moment the Straw Hat crew set foot on Wano’s long-awaited shores, it was clear something was different; the arc immediately dispensed with One Piece’s traditionally thin linework and limited shading, offering instead bold splashes of ink and color emulating audacious works of traditional calligraphy. Yet at the same time, one of my favorite things about Wano is how loosely it treats its new art design mandate; its aesthetic is a suggestion, not a demand, and individual animators frequently stray far beyond the models and linework of Wano’s standard mode.

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