Live action anime adaptations have a pretty bad reputation, particularly when being adapted by Hollywood. Every once in a while, you’ll get Alita: Battle Angel, a flawed but ultimately fine attempt to adapt the source material. But for every one Alita there’s three absolutely terrible films or TV shows. From the shitshow that was Dragon Ball Evolution to the baffling decision to have Scarlett Johansson explicitly play a Japanese woman trapped in a white woman’s robot body in Ghost in the Shell (despite it being completely superfluous and very easy to just make the character not-Asian, I mean seriously, what the hell) the fact is that Hollywood has had far more misses than hits when trying to bring anime/manga to the live action realm.
It's not hard to see why it’s a difficult assignment. It is taking content 1) from one medium and making it work in a different one, 2) trying to pitch it to Americans when the original was aimed for a Japanese audience, and 3) trying
to squeeze the correct amount of content into whatever limitations the new
medium has. Trying to fit tens of manga chapters into one film is hard enough, especially
when you have try trick Joe Schmo America into ponying up 14 bucks to watch it.
Netflix, the streaming giant who always seems to be one strong breeze away from
falling over in a pile up of massive debt and investor tears, has made several
attempts to buck the trend and so far they have not been received that warmly.
The most recent attempt, a live action TV adaptation of Cowboy Bebop, ended up
being very divisive among fans (as in, some fans thought it was fine but not at
all Cowboy Bebop and other fans thought it was an abomination against God).
So when Netflix announce they were creating a live action TV
adaptation of massively popular (but interestingly not particularly popular in
the United States) manga and anime One Piece, there was a lot of skepticism.
That manga creator Eiichiro Oda supposedly had some involvement didn’t really
make it easier to swallow. From my perspective, it was tough because on the one
hand I LOVE the One Piece comic and have been collecting it since 2003 (even
though I’m embarrassed to admit I only own 61 volumes out of the, as of this
writing, currently available 106 volumes). On the other hand, I actually don’t
like the anime, ever since I saw it shortly after reading the first
volume and deicide it was unable to capture the best qualities that made the
comic so good. So if I’m too much of a snob for the high successful One Piece anime how the hell
can I get into Netflix Presents One Piece, especially after the disappointment
of Netflix Presents Cowboy Bebop?
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| I meant to review this when it came out Short Version: Just go watch the anime instead |
Full review after the jump.
