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.

The Garish Seas of Saturation

The more things change, the more anime stays the same. While most of the world knows anime from outstanding examples like Princess Mononoke and Akira, the vast majority of anime films that get pumped out are like 2016's One Piece: Gold. The thirteenth theatrical release in the One Piece series, following on from the long running TV series and manga, it has all the usual earmarks of franchises that are long past their expiry date--it's overladen with old characters who get spotlight moments and can't be killed and the climax is a by-the-numbers fight that mostly involves characters screaming at each other about how powerful they are or how important friendship is or something similarly trite. Since this is One Piece, there was a fair amount of references to straw hats.

I saw this movie on the bus on the class field trip to and from Mie last week. By the third act of the film, I was the only one, apart from the driver, still awake on the bus. Sure, the kids were tired from the trip but I suspect they could've stayed awake had the movie contained the tiniest spark of life.

I've seen the first couple episodes of One Piece and they were entertaining. I always meant to go back to it. It's about pirates, obviously a subject of interest for me. The creator supposedly researched real pirates but that's so far never been at all apparent. The series is set in a fantasy world with the usual hodgepodge of historical signifiers. The main character is a kid named Luffy who has a stretchy limbs superpower like Reed Richards except he also seems to be nigh-indestructible. Along the way, he picked up a vast crew of quirky characters whom I'm sure all have their own delightful introductory episodes but in Gold are mostly just a roll call of character types.

The few female characters stand out, particularly the popular Nami, but every woman in the movie, without exception, is rail thin with massive breasts. I'm not against titillation and if that's your thing, more power to you, but surely some of the women in the background could have had variant body types at least. They all look like strippers, which I suppose kind of fits with the modern casino setting of the film. The movie's about the pirate crew attempting a heist. That is, until things devolve into the usual battle royale.