‘One Piece’ Director Hopes Series “Increases the Love” for the Manga and Anime

Translating anime and manga into live-action is a remarkably difficult feat if past attempts have revealed anything. Failures like the Death Note film, the Cowboy Bebop series, or the truly dreadful Dragon Ball: Evolution completely missed the mark on what made their inspiration special and failed to justify their existence in the face of their far greater animated counterparts. Netflix is hoping to reverse its fortunes with the upcoming One Piece adaptation directed by Marc Jobst, who has experience helming episodes of The Witcher and Daredevil. To ensure its success, even the Manga’s original creator.

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Speaking to Collider’s Arezou Amin, Jobst shared his hope of making something that could complement the original series and stand out as its own way to enjoy this story. Live action comes with its own perks. Netflix has spared no expense to bring the many ships, characters, and locales to life, making the series one of the most expensive to date across all of television. The result is some truly stunning sets that have been shown off in images and footage from the show ahead of release. Working with a new medium gives showrunners Steven Maeda and Matt Owens some room to play around with the material, but they also have the perfect resource on hand in the manga’s creator Eiichiro Oda who was deeply involved throughout the filming process to ensure the final product captured the heart of One Piece.

When asked if there was something from the series that was necessary in their eyes to differentiate the series, Jobst said “Well, yes, really,” and assured that the “why” of a live-action One Piece was discussed before anything got underway. “It was a conversation that Matt, Steve, and I had in a lot of depth when we first embarked on this show, which is, “Why do a live-action show? What is it we think we can add to what is already a phenomenal manga and a hugely successful anime by going into live-action? What do we think we can add to it?” Because there’s no point in just doing it for the sake of doing it; you wanna be able to add something to it.”

Jobst Hopes Fans Will Fall in Love With the Straw Hats All Over Again

Regarding what he thinks truly separates a live-action One Piece and gives it a different feel, it’s having live actors versus 2D characters. The cast assembled seems perfect for their respective roles with Iñaki Godoy leading the talented group as Monkey D. Luffy on his journey to find the One Piece and become King of the Pirates. He’s joined by Mackenyu, Emily Rudd, Jacob Romero Gibson, and Taz Skylar While the Straw Hat Pirates have captured people the world over for over 1,000 episodes of the anime and over 1,000 chapters of the manga, Jobst finds the live-action series adds another layer of humanity and empathy to the crew that will make even existing fans fall in love all over again:

“Of course, when you go into live-action, what you’re adding is dimension. When you put a character, a warm-blooded human being, an actor playing these two-dimensional drawings on a piece of paper, what you’re really doing is you’re dimensionalizing the character; you’re giving them a full three-dimensional emotional life that has a backstory, that has wants and desires, that has pains and hurts, that laughs, that cries, that has all of human frailty to it. So what we really passionately felt we could do to add to this brilliant project was dimension.”

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With a new dimension to these iconic characters, Jobst only hopes their work will only bring more love to the original anime and manga that started it all.

“What we really hope is that, by doing that, by creating characters that we hope the audience and the fans fall in love with, want to root for, that experience increases their love of the anime and increases their love of the manga because they’re dimensionalizing those two-dimensional characters that they see in the manga. And of course, vice versa; they bring in what they know about them from the manga into the live-action. So we really hope that we can sit alongside these others as a complement, an and/and not an and/or, if that makes sense.”

The live-action One Piece series premieres on Netflix on August 31. Check out the trailer below.