Manga and anime fans all over the world have been waiting for this day for a long time: the legendary pirate adventure One Piece by the Japanese manga artist Eiichiro Oda – the bestselling manga series of all time – has been adapted by Netflix into a live- action show.
“The biggest challenge for me was not to disappoint the expectations of existing One Piece fans,” Oda said ahead of the show’s launch.
The most important thing was that the show’s characters made the same impression as the ones loved by fans of the manga series, which started in 1997, he said. “And I think we’ve managed to do that.”
Launched on Netflix at the end of August, One Piece is an adventure that takes place on the high seas in a fictional world.
Monkey D. Luffy (played by Iñaki Godoy) is a young adventurer who has always had a desire for freedom. One day, he turns his back on his village and embarks on a dangerous journey to find the legendary treasure of pirate king Gol D. Roger, the “One Piece”, and become King of the Pirates.
On their quest, the Straw Hat Pirates, a crew of pirates led by Luffy, explore the vastness of the sea. They have to deal with powerful pirates, but also with the world government, which wants to prevent the discovery of One Piece. Luffy’s crew outperforms marines and outwits rivals at every corner.
One Piece: a good start for Netflix’s much anticipated manga adaptation
One Piece: a good start for Netflix’s much anticipated manga adaptation
It has been 26 years since Oda published his first One Piece manga on July 22, 1997. Since then, more than 1,000 individual chapters have been released.
The ongoing series became an international mega success for Oda. With more than half a billion copies sold worldwide, One Piece has become the top selling manga series of all time. It has also been adapted as an anime for television and cinema.
And now, for the first time, it is also an eight-episode series with real actors. For a long time, Oda thought this would not be a good idea.
“I’d had a lot of different offers for a live-action adaptation and I turned them all down for years,” explains Oda.
He thought manga was not meant to be made with real actors. But then the production technology continued to develop until he was finally convinced that it would work.
“People of my generation grew up watching and falling in love with Hollywood movies. Most of the hits in Japanese cinemas have been Hollywood films such as Indiana Jones, E.T. and Terminator,” the 48-year-old recalls. “That was my childhood.”
That is why he had “every expectation that if it was Hollywood producing this, the quality would be very high”.
Oda firmly believed that “instead of a Japanese studio, Hollywood would be able to do justice to the world that I had drawn”. And after seeing the end product he was “very, very happy”.
And yet the Netflix project presented a challenge.
“The biggest concern I’ve had with this whole endeavour is whether the series will be faithful to the characters that people have come to love, especially the Straw Hats,” explains Oda.
“If the fans don’t accept them as the characters from the manga and the anime, then I think even if you do a lot of great things with every other element of production, the whole thing will still fail.
“That’s why we paid very close attention to the development of the characters during the scriptwriting and casting,” says Oda.
His first-ever role as executive producer allowed him to “stop things before it was too late when he saw something moving in the wrong direction”.
“I cared about every detail and didn’t want to compromise on either the story or the action,” Oda says. “I wanted to make sure the end product was something the fans could watch and really, really, really enjoy.”
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Khushi Patel is a science fiction author who lives in Austin, Texas. She has published three novels, and her work has been praised for its originality and imagination. Khushi is a graduate of Rice University, and she has worked as a software engineer. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and her books have been nominated for several awards.
