One Piece’s Wano arc was when the anime finally lived up to the manga

polygon.com:

Nearly four and a half years after it began, One Piece’s Wano Country Arc has finished. The story is moving on to a new island, and One Piece itself is in a whole new world. In those four years, I personally have gone from One Piece curious to One Piece die-hard to professional One Piece pundit. And yet, when the new promotional image for the upcoming Egghead Arc graces my screen in January, it will be the first time ever that I will not be greeted by Monkey D. Luffy grinning in a well-worn kimono.

But it’s not just me or the promotional art that will have changed in the intervening years between Wano’s beginning and ending — it’s not even just the world, since Wano was there to cushion the entirety of the COVID experience. The One Piece anime itself, One Piece’s story, and its audience have all gone through major shifts. And the anime’s take on the Wano arc, ending about one year after the manga’s, was the throughline beneath it all.

The biggest shift within the anime production was clear within the first frames of the arc itself. Since time immemorial (so about the early 2000s), many manga fans have claimed low production quality was a primary reason they couldn’t stand the anime. This isn’t to say there were no incredible sequences, but few would dispute that for most of the 2000s and 2010s, One Piece’s animation largely lagged behind its peers. After all, it’s a year-round, weekly show. Still, “when does One Piece animation get good” is an auto-filled question on Google. But the answer is: the opening moments of Wano.

In a single moment, One Piece suddenly feels like a different show. Wano explodes onto your screen in a torrent of cherry blossom petals. The color palette is suddenly expanded, and the animation