Don’t judge One Piece by its anime
When I finished reading One Piece, I felt a 1,000-chapter hole in my heart. Hungry for more, I decided to rewatch some of my favorite moments via the anime. I wanted to know what the Straw Hat crew looked like bursting through the great open seas fully animated. I wanted more of this world I had grown to love over the months I blazed through the manga.
But as I turned to the animation, I was disappointed.
Boisterous, joyous scenes of the Straw Hat crew celebrating victories with buckets of booze and colorful characters seemed to fall flat. Perfectly paced frame-by-frame fights turned into drawn-out scenes that dragged across entire episodes. Luffy, the pirate protagonist of the series whose superpower is to stretch like rubber, came across as surprisingly stiff in the earlier episodes.
That’s not to say I’m here to absolutely roast theOne Piece anime. It’s over 1,000 episodes long, and for any show to make it that far is a feat. Like any anime of that size, it has its high and low points — I won’t hold its early-2000s animation against it. It’s still a great story and I still got giddy during the big reveals. Rewatching arcs even helped me notice details I missed while reading.
But here’s what I told my little brother while watching: “This is fun. But you should just go read the manga.”
As of this year, One Piece presents a 25-year-long epic that follows Luffy, a pirate with the power to stretch like rubber, and the Straw Hats, his crew of pirates. Like many shonen protagonists, Luffy’s goal is very simple: He wants to become the Pirate King, and thus the most infamous pirate in the world. Creator Eiichiro Oda released the first chapter in 1997, and it has since become one of the most beloved manga franchises of all
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