The Academic Blog Post 02
Animation and Cinema: How One Piece is a Mediator between two Worlds
From the pages of Eiichiro Oda’s manga to the vibrant world of anime to its live-action adaptations on-screen, One Piece has made one hell of a journey across media. The origin of this evolution is not only a lens through which we can better understand the cultural significance of animation, but it also addresses a decadeslong debate about animation and cinema itself. The live-action series places both art forms in the spotlight and dares us to look past their differences in considering their strengths, their limits and the opportunities of both.
That’s not when One Piece became a manga: It’s been serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump since 1997 (Oda, 1997). It would later reach new heights, being adapted into an anime, which fans would be overjoyed to see come to life in a colorful, energetic fashion, boasting goofy character designs and a lively world. It was everything from the anime’s ability to show outlandish worlds both like the Grand Line or Sky Island and overblown fights that eventually made it iconic.
So, when tackled the leap to live-action (2023) in making it, it faced a quirky challenge of its own making: how do you bring the heart of an animated universe with all of its possibilities to a world of cinema with all of its realism? The transition calls attention to the strengths and weaknesses particular to animation and cinema, as it were.
Figure 1: Luffy’s anime vs Netflix design (side by side)
The Unique Power of Animation
And animation is the true definition of creative freedom. It can exaggerate emotion, violate the laws of physics and push the boundaries of the imaginable. Luffy's gum-gum powers in One Piece were never meant to be believable, and that is what allows them to characterize him as an icon of characterenness and joy. The anime makes great use of gaudy colors, dynamic camera angles and exaggerated expressions that lend moments like Nami’s famous “Help me!” an additional emotional charge. literal farewell to the Going Merry; the moment.
Animation provides a decent amount of cohesion as well as forward motion in story as well as imagery, which lends itself to audiences suspending their disbelief quite nicely. The Straw Hat crew’s constant maneuvering across surreal landscapes, from the haunted waters of Thriller Bark to the vibrant arenas of Dressrosa, feel natural to the medium. It is at this point where the artifice of animation becomes capital as it opens up a space within itself, within a world where the fantastical belongs (Manovich, 2001).
Figure 2: A screen shot from anime Going Merry funeral scene displaying emotive depth with color, lighting, and emotive character expression.
The Search for Realism in the Cinema
Cinema, by contrast, equals realism and immersion. The live action One Piece series recreates recognizable locales including Baratie and Arlong Park using a combination of practical sets and CGI (Netflix, 2023). The cast instantly embodies the essence of the characters, performing wonders in performances that Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s description calls humanizing the fantastical.
At the same time, realism can be a crutch. Luffy’s stretching in live action, while impressive in a technical sense, doesn’t have the winking, fun fluid quality of his animated counterpart. The exaggerated malice of a characters such as Buggy the Clown dwindles in the honing limits of human anatomy (Arnheim, 1938)
But cinema compensates by attracting new ones. This live-action adaptation is a bridge to that screen for people who have never seen anime and fills those cultural gaps and reestablished its legacy.
Figure 3: A photo from behind the scenes of the Netflix One Piece set, illustrating how practical effects are enhanced with CGI.
The journey from One Piece the animation to One Piece the cinema isn’t a one way street. It’s a conversation between two forms of media. The live-action series drew liberally from many of the anime’s stylistic choices, including dynamic camera angles used in fight sequences or colorful costumes that retained their cartoonishness.
This is a mix that chimes in well with Lev Manovich’s own claim that the rules of animation have become ubiquitous to a large part of modernity — cinema (Manovich, 2001). We see this convergence in hybrid work such as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse or Undone in which the conventional divisions that once demarcated the mediums dissolve, allowing for a new form of narrative (Krauss, 2000).
Figure 4: A few examples of hybrid media, such as One Piece live-action, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Undone, are used as collage
Cultural Contexts and Debates
This is not a creative challenge for One Piece it’s a cultural one. In the West, animation had been widely regarded as "childish," and as a result, had difficulty being recognized as an art form (Manovich, 2001). By contrast, that a Japanese anime can serve as a valid all-ages medium that takes on everything from friendship to existentialism is what has made it a cultural cachet.
Netflix was behind the live-action series, but it is part of a broader trend of Western companies ham-handedly interacting with and adapting weaboondage for their foreign consumers. This raises some important questions: Are these adaptations being faithful to the source material, or are they being make nice for a wider audience?
Conclusion The World Without Borders
It’s a perfect demonstration of how the line between animation and cinema is being blurred. Each has its strengths, naturally the lustrous ingredient of creative freedom that animation allows, the illusory power of the cinema but it’s the overlap that makes these individual works so exciting. The live-action series has paved the way for a future where these mediums don’t compete but enhance each other, deepening the art of the story.
It’s something audiences are to be rewarded from this convergence. Whether you fall on the side of the colorful artifice of the anime or the earth-bound spectacle of the live-action — One Piece is a work that shows us that great stories can cross the boundaries of medium, and that there’s a Grand Line just out there waiting for us all to dream.
Arnheim, R. (1938) ‘Artistic composites and the talking film’, Film Culture, 1(1), pp. 15-22.
Krauss, R. (2000) A voyage on the North Sea: Art in the age of the post-medium condition. London: Thames & Hudson.
Manovich, L. (2001) The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Netflix (2023) One Piece Live-Action Series. [Online] Available at: https://www.netflix.com/tudum/galleries/one-piece-behind-the-scenes-photos?mediaIndex=14.
Oda, E. (1997–present) One Piece Manga Series. Weekly Shōnen Jump.
ScreenRant (2023) ‘One Piece: Luffy’s anime design vs. live-action adaptation’, ScreenRant. [Online] Available at: https://screenrant.com/one-piece-luffy-netflix-live-action-different-clever/.
ScreenRant (2023) ‘One Piece: Netflix outfit Easter egg adaptation’, ScreenRant. [Online] Available at: https://screenrant.com/one-piece-netflix-outfit-easter-egg-anime-adaptation-problem-fix/.
YouTube (2023) One Piece: Going Merry funeral scene. [Online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdDBsgUvr3U.
