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Eiichiro Oda, who attended a recent fan screening of Netflix’s “One Piece,” said he “acted as a guard dog to ensure the material was being adapted in the correct way.”Credit...Yuri Hasegawa for The New York Times
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By Charles Solomon
On Thursday, an eight-part adaptation of Eiichiro Oda’s pirate comedy-adventure “One Piece” will make its Netflix debut. The stakes are high: Millions of fans want to see if the showrunners, Matt Owens and Steven Maeda (whom Oda describes as “‘One Piece’ superfans”), succeeded in converting the beloved manga and anime series to live-action. Although some viewers over 30 may not recognize the title, “One Piece” is one of the most popular entertainment franchises in the world.
Since July 1997, when it began appearing in the Japanese manga magazine Weekly Shonen Jump, “One Piece” collections have sold more than 516 million copies worldwide. An animated TV series notched its 1,000th episode earlier this year, and there have been numerous TV specials, light novels and video games; fans discuss “One Piece” trivia on countless websites. The 15th theatrical feature, “One Piece Film: Red,” was the No. 1 box-office hit in Japan in 2022, outdrawing “Top Gun: Maverick.”
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Oda is extremely private — he does not allow his face to be photographed, if he can help it — but he talked about “One Piece” in a rare interview from Los Angeles. Speaking through the interpreter Taro Goto, he discussed the origins of “One Piece,” casting its hero for TV, and the film that changed his mind about live-action adaptation. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
When it comes to adapting a phenomenally popular manga and anime series like “One Piece” to live action, what do you have to keep in mind?
A live-action adaptation of a manga doesn’t simply re-enact the source material on a one-to-one basis: It involves really thinking about what fans love about the characters, the dynamics among them — and being faithful to those elements. A good live-action show doesn’t have to change the story too much. The most important thing is whether the actors can reproduce the characters in a way that will satisfy the people who read the manga. I think we did it well, so I hope audiences will accept it.
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