Highlights
- The debate between manga versus anime for One Piece continues, highlighting the challenges each medium faces in portraying epic battles.
- Fights are crucial to the story, introducing power-ups and vital character growth moments, setting up confrontations with overarching antagonists.
- Toei Animation can enhance the anime adaptation by focusing on more engaging content, like extended fight sequences, to captivate fans and elevate the storytelling.
For years, there have been many raging debates about the preferred medium to experience Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, one of the most successful shonen manga in history. The manga, with its unique artwork and panels filled to the brim with content, is the original version of the story, told exactly as its creator intended for it to be read. On the other hand, the long-running anime produced by Toei Animation, has also received praise for its depiction of crucial moments and important fight sequences, although it has been dealing with pacing issues and inconsistencies in its art style due to its year-round production schedule for some time now.
Battles in manga are constrained by the limits of the medium, having to convey their flow through static black and white panels. While these limitations can help foster innovation in the medium — as seen in Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball, Yusuke Murata’s One Punch Man, or Kentaro Miura’s Berserk — the dynamic medium of anime has an upper hand in depicting such scenes. Recent episodes of One Piece have shown a potential avenue for Toei Animation to solve some of the anime’s longstanding shortcomings, through the inclusion of more elaborate anime-only fight scenes, and here’s how this could boost interest in the Egghead Arc.
Why Are Fights Important To One Piece?
As much as it is a tale of adventure and exploration, buoyed by fantastic world building on a scale that very few manga can compete with, One Piece is also a typical battle shonen series in some respects. The Straw Hat Pirates’ fights against the various antagonists they encounter along their journey are as critical to the flow of the narrative as the crew’s expeditions into new, uncharted lands.
Every piece of world building, every new supporting character, and every new situation Luffy and his crew find themselves in, eventually leads to a final confrontation with the saga’s overarching antagonist. In fact, Luffy’s fights, and, to a lesser extent, those of Zoro and Sanji, have been vital to the conclusion of each story arc. Besides the sense of spectacle that accompanies these battles, they also introduce important power-ups, and contain moments that are crucial to the growth of the Straw Hat Pirates, and other supporting characters.
Replacing Filler With More Engaging Content
Where this ties into the ongoing issues with Toei Animation’s One Piece anime, relates to the challenge of cutting down on the filler content and padded scenes, which have helped prevent the series from catching up to the manga too soon. Toei Animation cannot really be blamed for resorting to this, especially with the anime’s strict production schedule, which has been churning out weekly episodes for almost 25 years now. However, this has also contributed to the fandom’s growing disdain for the anime as a whole.
Episode 1093 of the anime featured a slightly expanded version of the battle between Trafalgar Law’s Heart Pirates, and the Blackbeard Pirates on Winner Island. Living up to the high quality animation seen in the climax of the Wano Country Arc, the fight was an engrossing spectacle that warranted an entire episode for itself, which is intriguing since it only covered a single chapter’s worth of content from the manga. As the anime has been adapting its source material at a similar pace, such extended fight sequences could be a way for Toei Animation to add value to their retelling of the story, by drawing on the benefits of the medium.
How Could This Improve The Egghead Arc’s Adaptation?
In the manga, following some exposition concerning the structure of Egghead Island as well as the enigmatic Dr. Vegapunk and his six satellites, the focus shifts to developments in the New World, where supporting characters are clashing against one another. Without spoiling too much, there are a few upcoming fights involving Monkey D. Garp, Captain Koby, Eustass Kid, and Shanks, that have the potential to be treated similarly. This would almost certainly help to generate interest in the anime, and build up the overall climax of the Egghead Arc itself.
Looking at what is yet to be adapted from the manga, it is not a stretch to say that the One Piece anime will be filled with action-packed moments this year, and this presents a golden opportunity for it to catch up to its peers in the medium. Until recently, One Piece’s animation had fallen short of the lofty standards set by contemporary shonen titles such as Jujutsu Kaisen, Attack on Titan, or Demon Slayer. Despite the spike in interest surrounding the anime during the Wano Country Arc and the highly anticipated debut of Luffy’s Gear 5 in 2023, there were still some lingering signs of the flaws that had plagued the production for years.
An Ideal Set Of Circumstances For Toei Animation
Now entering the Final Saga, One Piece as a franchise is in a very strong position, bolstered by the acclaim received by the Wano Country Arc, the successful live-action Netflix adaptation, and the announcement of a new anime retelling by WIT Studio. If there is ever a time for Toei Animation to capitalize on the heightened excitement surrounding One Piece, it is now, especially if their version of the anime may eventually become obsolete.
This is not to say that the current One Piece anime is without its merits, as there are some moments over its extremely long run that hold immense nostalgic value for fans, and have exerted a significant level of influence on the medium as a whole. Nevertheless, if Toei Animation can continue to up their game, and give the fans what they really want — more bombastic fight sequences — then One Piece in its anime form, may finally be able to regain what it had lost sight of, and do justice to Eiichiro Oda’s genius in the story’s final act.
One Piece is available to stream on Crunchyroll.
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