Nami (Emily Rudd) is a thief, though not, she repeatedly declares, a pirate her veiled mission is at the heart of the series’ one substantial story arc. Roronoa Zoro (Mackenyu Arata), is a pirate hunter (just another apparent contradiction), whose desire is to become the world’s greatest swordsman. In “Wizard of Oz” fashion, Luffy picks up associates as he goes, each with their own agenda. Indeed, following one’s dream is the story’s supreme moral good. (That Luffy dreams of seeing his face on a wanted poster, alongside the pirates who constitute the story’s colorful villains, makes no real sense, but it‘s just one of several things here you should not think too hard about.) Just as there are good pirates and bad pirates, so there must be good and bad Marines, Luffy tells new friend Koby (Morgan Davies) whose dream is to join up. And freedom.” There is a bit of Rebels versus Empire dynamic in this world, which has a single government and global naval police force, though morally it remains a little ambiguous. Luffy’s definition of piracy, which is not really shared by any of the series’ other pirates - though some are nicer than others - has nothing to do with actual piracy: “Being a pirate isn’t about raiding villages or perfect plans, it’s about adventure. What’s more, his body is made of rubber, the result of eating an exotic “devil fruit.” (Other devil fruit eaters, with different powers, will be met along the way, and they are all bad.) This will come in handy in the numerous fight scenes that pepper the series. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy) is the hero, an aggressively enthusiastic, monomaniacal young man whose dream is not just to be a pirate, but to be King of the Pirates, an ambition he reiterates to the point of exhaustion and which the One Piece will somehow fulfill. (It has the reputation of being a “pirate’s graveyard,” for the weather, sea monsters and other pirates.) Though one might think it not hard to find - just sail until you hit it - a map to the place is the season’s major MacGuffin. It is set in a world (not ours historically, geographically, zoologically) during a “great age of pirates,” who are all after the eponymous One Piece - a great undescribed treasure located somewhere in the Grand Line, which seems to be a belt of islands that circumnavigates the globe. Taken on its own, the series, developed by Matt Owens and Steven Maeda, is lively and nonsensical. (Sixty episodes of the anime are also streaming on Netflix.) ![]() (There have also been 15 feature films.) I assume some hopeful long-term plan has been filed - some money has been spent putting it together unlike, say, the streamer’s canceled-after-a-season “ Cowboy Bebop” - but apart from the impossibility of ever catching up with a series with a quarter-century head start whose conclusion has yet to be written, the current economics of television suggest that only a small fraction of this saga will ever be filmed. ![]() The opening season of this new version covers only the first 11 of 106 collected volumes and the first 44 episodes of the cartoon. Written and drawn by Eiichirô Oda, the manga has been in progress since 1997, and the anime (which has logged more than a thousand episodes) since 1999. ![]() Being familiar only with the latter, I can’t say how much comes from the page and how much from the screen, but the main characters and story points of the anime are here, in recognizable form - as much as there is of it. Which brings us to “One Piece,” premiering Thursday on Netflix, based on what is reportedly the world’s bestselling manga and the anime that followed it quickly into life. It’s not always successful, and, one might add, nothing new - the first movie of “ Alice in Wonderland” dates to 1903 - but it’s where we live now and for the foreseeable future. ![]() Turning comics and cartoons into live-action movies and television, as the Blue Fairy transformed the puppet Pinocchio into a real boy, remains a popular industrial strategy in a world where proven intellectual property rules the roost.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |