Netflix has recently dropped a ton of One Piece content. Looks like the first 15 seasons of the main animated series, and a bunch of the films and specials, certainly all in support of their brand-new live action series.
I’ve heard of this but never seen it before. Watching some of the animated series first. Art looks like fairly standard Japanese TV-level animation. Kind of hard to follow so far, but I’m admittedly only 6 minutes into the second episode.
I should probably pay closer attention to these early episodes, but it all seems like it would feel pretty familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a decent amount of this kind of show.
Extremely confident teen protagonist with inexplicable superpower? Check.
Over-the-top cartoonishly evil villains? Check.
Goofy, scared, but surprisingly useful sidekick friend? Check.
Mysterious tough-guy drifter with tragic backstory and secret agenda, but “I’ll tag along with you for a while”? Check.
I enjoyed the manga when it came out, lost track of it when Shonen Jump dropped their English language paper publication, returned to it last year and am now less than 1/3 caught up to this 1090 issue monster. The mangaka is highly intuitive, the manga very high energy.
How does the anime compare with the manga? Early on I heard the English dub was awful, and never got interested enough to tackle it.
Judging from the previews, Iñaki Godoy nails the Luffy character. Not so sure about everything else: the NYT gave the series weak reviews.
I finished watching the 8 episodes of the live action series, having seen none of the animated or comic book versions.
It was interesting with some nice stunts and special effects, but the mixture of wacky hijinks and brooding melodrama was a bit strange. On the plus side, there was no sexual harassment which is something I’m not a big fan of in Japanese cartoons.
My teen and I binged the live action series this past weekend and I really enjoyed it. He is a pretty big fan of the anime and I’ve seen some eps here and there but I didn’t have much knowledge going in.
I really liked the characters and I thought the actors did a great job. Yes, a lot of the stuff was goofy but I also liked how positive and supportive Monkey was with his friends. Iñaki Godoy did a great job of inhabiting the character, imo.
Having watched some of both but not all of the live action series and the animated, I’d say the live action series captures the animated about as well as it could be done. It certainly moves a lot faster than the animated.
The animated has a ridiculous number of episodes and almost nothing happens in any given one. The first 5 minutes is just a recap of the last episode, the opening theme song is 2.5 minutes long, and at least half of every episode is extended silent freeze frame close-ups on faces and inane commentary from the peanut gallery on what little action is occurring. Which is all pretty standard for this style of animation, but if you skip through all that crap there’s literally only about 7-8 minutes of actual plot advancement per episode, so I’m almost all the way through the first 65 episodes.
After I watched the live action version of Cowboy Bebop, I tried watching some episodes of the original animated series and I similarly felt like nothing much was happening.
Most of Cowboy Bebop is episodic, not related to the overarching story arch. Also it has a slow start: Faye Valentine doesn’t appear until episode 3, the first big arc episode is number 5 (the 2nd is number 12), and Radical Ed only shows up in episode 9. If you get through episode 10 and still don’t like it, ah well. Try something else.