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Adapting a beloved anime into live-action film or TV is one of the most thankless tasks a creator could find themselves unlucky enough to be stuck with. Most are assumed to be doomed from the moment they're greenlit, with several hundred pieces of compelling evidence, but, just because it's likely to fail doesn't mean it's guaranteed.
The unabashed failure of Netflix's Cowboy Bebop sounded the death knell for the still upcoming One Piece adaptation. The latest in a very long line of botched live-action adaptations was famously canceled twenty days after the season's release on the platform. One Piece soldiers on without trepidation in the face of its predecessor's disaster.
One Piece needs no introduction, it's one of the most enduringly popular pieces of narrative fiction ever written. Eiichiro Oda's ongoing shonen franchise laid the bedrock for much of the modern success of anime and broke the mold time and time again. The manga will celebrate its 25th anniversary next month, marked by an unbroken streak of overwhelming success. The anime remains one of the most beloved series in the medium after over a thousand episodes. New trends come and go in the world of anime, or even in the shonen genre, but One Piece remains unshakably among the top names. With all that in mind, with the mountains of films, video games, and other merchandise that the franchise has spawned, it's shocking that it took this long to put a live-action adaptation to the screen.
Adapting an anime to live-action varies in difficulty based on the esoteric nature of the series. Looking at the concept as a spectrum might place more realistic anime like Ruroni Kenshin on one side and One Piece firmly on the other. Kenshin makes the transition to live-action fairly easily. The multiple film adaptations of the franchise come across like a ton of other Japanese action films with enough of the series' flavor to feel special. Cowboy Bebop falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, but Netflix's adaptation still managed to fall short of most fans' expectations. Money was unquestionably part of the problem, but plenty of productions have done more with less. One Piece is much more of an uphill battle and making anything that resembles the manga or anime in live-action will be a difficult challenge.
The best anime adaptations out there include the Wachowskis' 2008 take on Speed Racer or Takashi Miike's Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Capturing the visual aesthetic is only part of what makes these films great. The filmmakers in question have mountains of experience with original and adapted stories and possess the talent to find which pieces of a work are integral. A strong creative vision is key to capturing the spirit of a work and bringing it to a new medium. It's a nebulous concept, but fans can pick out the examples that pull it off and those that fall short. The worst live-action adaptations spit in the face of the original work, flipping it on its head to pursue a more popular film idea. This is the unfortunate reality that holds Adam Wingard's Death Note and Dragonball Evolution.
The Cowboy Bebop adaptation is probably the biggest red flag surrounding the One Piece adaptation. Both were being produced for the same service, and they share a few members of the production crew. That series went awry in a variety of large and small ways, but the most unforgivable aspects were in the way they handled the characters. If Netflix's One Piece nails the depiction of the Straw Hat Pirate crew, everything else is secondary. Even if they get large aspects of the narrative wrong or deliberately toss aside most of the lore, it won't matter. If every line out of a hero's mouth has fans sincerely convinced that they're still watching their favorite character from the anime, the series will still be enjoyable to fans and newcomers. As long as fans feel the portrayals of Luffy, Nami, Zoro, Sanji, and the rest are on-point, they'll be happy to hang out with their beloved pirate crew in whatever non-sequitur quest Netflix sends them off on.
Netflix's One Piece will not maintain any semblance of the storytelling format fans are familiar with. Whatever elements of the plot remain similar to the source material will not be told in the same way, events will occur out of order, pacing will have to change, and it remains to be seen how well the material will translate. Whatever changes must be made to fit the new medium, as long as Netflix's One Piece understands what fans love about the crew and the atmosphere, the series can still flourish. It'll never replace the manga and anime, both will easily outlive the live-action series' memory. But, if handled well, the series might be able to stand alongside the mountain of spin-offs and merchandise on this whale of a franchise. Best-case scenario, it'll be a killer entry point for a new generation of fans.