If you’ve paid attention to our website for long enough you’ll know that when it comes to video game movie adaptations, we’ve heavily documented how they’ve been terrible up until very recently. The other side of that coin though is that of live-action anime adaptations. Anime is easily one of the most visual forms of media when it comes to the more “fantastical” series if you will. The special abilities, the character looks, and so on make it difficult to adapt, and yet, they keep trying. Death Note, Full Metal Alchemist, Attack on Titan and more have gotten the treatment with very mixed, and downright terrible at times, results. Yet, they keep being made, like with the upcoming One Piece adaptation on Netflix.
You might recall that the anime actually has a home on Netflix already, including with the upcoming movie One Piece: Red that is due out on the service soon. But this adaptation will be the first live-action one done, and there are many who are curious about what will happen. Some are downright scared of what will happen because they still recall when Netflix did the Death Note adaptation and it was downright terrible.
Thankfully, we do have a little more context on what the show is going to be like in its first season. Because given that the anime is over 1000 episodes long, a 10-episode or so season can’t capture the whole anime, so what are they going to do? The answer comes from Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, who is one of the cinematographers of the adaptation. She notes that the first season will focus on the East Blue Saga, which is about the earliest stories from the anime. Of which Whitaker and the director for the adaptation watched all 1000+ episodes to ensure they knew what they needed to do.
However, one thing she did emphasize was the fact that the live-action version won’t be a “carbon copy” of what the anime did. It aims to “stand on its own” in various ways:
“If the story isn’t there, and that doesn’t grab the viewers, it doesn’t matter what you do. We can only hope that we’re going to gain a new audience and people that find it fascinating and interesting.”
To an extent that is fine, it’d be foolish to try and recreate every episode and encounter and fight in a live-action adaptation. That’d be costly and at points, wasteful. Especially since anime is notorious for filler episodes and arcs.
If they are able to bring everything to bear in terms of the main story and how the Straw Hat Pirates come together? Then maybe this will be the adaptation that changes the tide on how things go from now on.
Source: Filmmakers Academy