Piece for Peace

I've watched the first two episodes of Netflix's live action One Piece. I can't help wondering who this show is for despite the fact that it's apparently massively popular, being one of the most successful shows to ever debut on Netflix, ranking with Stranger Things and Wednesday. It certainly must have a built in audience since the anime TV series has over 1000 episodes, the manga is even longer, and there are several feature films. I saw one of the movies and I wrote about how boring it was last year. The first five or six episodes of the anime TV series I found to be a little better. That's the way with most long running anime series. They get maybe one season where the creators can be inventive, where interesting characters can meet, important characters can die or get significant new powers, etc. But once something becomes really popular, all the characters have to be frozen in a particular stage of development.

I guess hoping to avoid a disaster like the live action Cowboy Bebop, the live action One Piece seems at times to be blindly faithful to the original except where budgetary restraints come in. The bit where Luffy is carried by a giant bird before finally getting a proper introduction to Nami is only passingly referring to in dialogue. But the show keeps the basic aesthetic as well as the underlying rules of the fantasy world.

And that's a problem. When I watch the anime, I feel like I'm watching something for kids aged 13 and under. But the Netflix show has bloody severed limbs and cursing. By the time of the movie I saw, any hint of graphic violence seemed to be absent from One Piece. Early episodes of the anime TV series have a couple actual deaths of unnamed characters. Meanwhile, it's a world where sex doesn't seem to exist, despite creator Oda Eiichiro evidently getting hornier and hornier over the years.

A sure sign Oda had limited input in the live action series is the absence of bikinis. Press says he had a lot of input in his executive producer role but press said the same thing about Watanabe Shinichiro and Cowboy Bebop, only for Watanabe to say he had basically no control after the show ended up being a dud.

The absence of sex is only one of the things I find disturbing about the show. Yeah, I say disturbing because the show is fundamentally about loyalty and morality, about what it means to be a good person. But every dramatic proclamation of morals feels very hollow when the story is so hazy on what the stakes are. Luffy wants to be a pirate who doesn't steal or murder but he and his crew apparently don't have to worry about finding alternative means of survival. If pirates don't steal or kill, it's not clear what they actually do aside from searching for the fabled treasure called "One Piece".

Inaki Godoy is very charming as Luffy and I appreciated how much he reminded me of Errol Flynn. But even Errol Flynn's Robin Hood was fighting Prince John because the ordinary people of English were starving. There was a sense of necessities for survival. The live action One Piece reminds me a little of the Russian Brother series of films, a kind of fascist story about a kindly strong man who goes around beating up bad guys.

One Piece is available on Netflix.