Is this too cheesy? That’s what I’ve found myself thinking 20 minutes into more than one episode of Netflix’s new pirate adventure “One Piece”. By the end of each, I’m always hooked and smiling – except for the one or two episodes where I shed a tear. “One Piece” is one of the most sincere pieces of storytelling going: goofy, hopeful, often ridiculous, and deeply celebratory of people’s goodness in an age when that can feel difficult.
“One Piece” follows Monkey D. Luffy, a wannabe pirate without a ship and a crew that keeps insisting they’re not his crew. Luffy’s got two things going for him: he’s always honest and he’s made of rubber thanks to ingesting a devil fruit as a boy. Like all those granted powers by a devil fruit, however, sea water saps him of his strength. It’s a curious career choice then, and as many point out he’s kind and not cruel. As he’s fond of saying, “I’m a different kind of pirate”.
He’s joined, grudgingly, by an expert swordsman who’s a pirate hunter and a skilled thief who hates pirates. They keep together out of shared interest and even as they consider leaving Luffy behind, they develop a loyalty to each other. It’s a strange start for a pirate crew, and it gets stranger still as they run from island to island helping others even as they’re chased by the autocratic marines. It could easily be compared to a D&D game where the GM’s comfortable with letting the players get creative and chaotic.
As a franchise, “One Piece” can seem a little insurmountable to newbies like me. This is a review from someone who hasn’t read Oda Eiichiro’s manga or seen the anime on which it’s based. I’m an anime fan – just poke around the site a bit – but the anime series is daunting at 20 seasons and counting. If I was going to try it out, a live-action series starting from the origins feels like a good entry point.
Netflix does not have the best history with live-action adaptations of anime (see “Cowboy Bebop”, “Death Note”), so I almost didn’t give this one a try – especially after seeing how cheesy the trailer looked. That’s where being a critic comes in handy. Even if I don’t like something, I can still write about why.
Too bad then that I loved it. I think the best way to come to “One Piece” is much like you would to “Xena”. You’re there for the fun of it, for the jokes and the cheese and the sincerity and the hope and the characters played over-earnestly by actors who aren’t afraid of chewing some scenery.
The difference here is that “One Piece” clearly has the budget to realize every little piece of its wonderfully ridiculous world-building. A mansion set in the third and fourth episodes is filled with some of the best production design of the year. Statues, candlesticks, and decorative plates abound like in a regency romance, but the statues are of penguins and there are so many plates they’re layered on top of each other and go across the ceiling. Inexplicably, snails are used as telephones and they’re both weirdly revolting and I want one. Why is any of this? Cause “One Piece”, that’s why.
I wouldn’t compare this to “The Fifth Element” because they’re very different stories with different priorities, but there’s the same expectation of accepting a meticulous ridiculousness. It’s not because that sensibility is pinned to the dramatic stakes – it’s because the story’s really about the world building detail and the amount of effort and care put into it. You start to realize if you can care about it, too, everything inside is directed toward you having fun.
We often overlook nonsense literature unless it’s in the form of “Alice in Wonderland”, but as T.S. Eliot wrote of Edward Lear in “The Music of Poetry”, nonsense storytelling “is not a vacuity of sense; it is a parody of sense, and that is the sense of it”.
“One Piece” is not exclusively nonsense storytelling, but there are enormous streaks of it here. As Anna Barton wrote in “Nonsense Literature”, nonsense has “a kind of anarchic potential because, by making fun of language, nonsense presents a significant challenge to the power language has to name, know, and own the world”.
“One Piece” fuses traditional, episodic dramatic themes and risky excursions into nonsense to make something irrepressibly playful that’s still built around darker complexities. At its best, its playfulness becomes a resistance to misanthropy and hypocrisy, a way of changing norms against a tide of abusive systems and the con artists who seize power in them.
It’s great when something can do that thematically, and “One Piece” is critical of hegemonic systems, nepotism, and the police state while embracing inclusion and diversity. But when nonsense work can also come in and highlight vibrancy, sincerity, and the ambition of hope – when it can give dimension to those themes in contrast – then you’ve got something whole and rare and special.
Is “One Piece” too cheesy? Nearly always, and that lets it be so thematically brave without losing its sense of play, to visit dark ideas without losing focus on the way back from them.
It makes me smile a lot because it feels earnest and unapologetic. It’s not making concessions about what it is, or compensating out of shame the way other live-action adaptations of anime have. It feels immensely proud of the story it has to tell and the world in which it takes place. It wants to show off everything, and I want to see it all. Its joy isn’t infectious because it isn’t a result. It’s joy is…well-reasoned. It’s the approach taken to get there. It has a purpose. It argues joy is a strength because it embraces kindness and resistance and inclusion.
“One Piece” is goofy and cheesy and some will doubtlessly bounce off of its very high bar for suspension of disbelief. But it also fixes on the spark of something that can feel weathered and worn at this point in our world. It reminds me that spark endures even if clouded, even when exhausted. Artists can still speak it into clarity.
“One Piece” is on Netflix.
Subscribe to my Patreon! It helps with the time and resources to write more articles like this.
Gabriel Diego Valdez 