Almost 4 and a half years after it started, One Piece’s Wano Nation Arc has completed. The story is shifting on to a brand new island, and One Piece itself is in a complete new world. In these 4 years, I personally have gone from One Piece curious to One Piece die-hard to skilled One Piece pundit. And but, when the brand new promotional picture for the upcoming Egghead Arc graces my display screen in January, it is going to be the primary time ever that I can’t be greeted by Monkey D. Luffy grinning in a well-worn kimono.
Nevertheless it’s not simply me or the promotional artwork that can have modified within the intervening years between Wano’s starting and ending — it’s not even simply the world, since Wano was there to cushion everything of the COVID expertise. The One Piece anime itself, One Piece’s story, and its viewers have all gone by means of main shifts. And the anime’s tackle the Wano arc, ending about one 12 months after the manga’s, was the throughline beneath all of it.
The largest shift inside the anime manufacturing was clear inside the first frames of the arc itself. Since time immemorial (so in regards to the early 2000s), many manga followers have claimed low manufacturing high quality was a main purpose they couldn’t stand the anime. This isn’t to say there have been no unimaginable sequences, however few would dispute that for many of the 2000s and 2010s, One Piece’s animation largely lagged behind its friends. In spite of everything, it’s a year-round, weekly present. Nonetheless, “when does One Piece animation get good” is an auto-filled query on Google. However the reply is: the opening moments of Wano.
In a single second, One Piece immediately seems like a unique present. Wano explodes onto your display screen in a torrent of cherry blossom petals. The colour palette is immediately expanded, and the animation itself immediately feels extra detail-oriented. A fluidity and vibrancy bursts onto your display screen that One Piece by no means had earlier than that very second. By the way, it’s additionally accompanied by one of the crucial infectious musical cues within the collection’ historical past — which actually says one thing.
The workforce at Toei Animation makes some really impressed choices when embellishing the manga, too. Wano is clearly meant as a love letter to Japan, with the island of Wano itself basically depicting the Edo interval. The manga performs with style, mythology, historical past, and leisure archetypes, however the anime steps as much as the plate so as to add an extra layer of music and theater. The anime makes use of the framework of a kabuki play to superimpose a three-act construction throughout your entire arc, bringing out kabuki’s well-known multicolored curtain to sign the start and ending of every act. Within the arc’s remaining episode, the present retells the most important battle by means of a bunraku efficiency, whereby a singer/narrator is accompanied by shamisen.
As soon as we get to the action-heavy second half of Wano — the Raid on Onigashima — One Piece’s animation went up one other big step: Now, the collection was permitting animators to create extremely stylized sequences that clearly contained an individualistic watermark. The ensuing experimentation yielded a number of the most visually beautiful motion sequences of the previous a number of years.
The hallmarks saved coming. Episode 1,015, which adapts the manga’s 1,000th chapter, is itself one of the best episode of the collection, and arguably one of many biggest episodes of anime ever made. Only a few collection must show, over the course of a single episode, how a lot the primary character has grown and the way a lot nearer he’s to attaining his dream. Episode director Megumi Ishitani not solely executes this Herculean feat successfully, however she gracefully pads out the occasions of the chapter with attractive, emotional scenes that arguably show that progress extra successfully than even the manga.
It’s no shock that increasingly beforehand manga-only followers say they’re tuning into the anime, not less than for key episodes. The collection additionally gained Finest Persevering with Collection on the 2023 Crunchyroll Anime Awards, a well-deserved acknowledgement of its more and more adventurous animation.
However the crown jewel of Wano is Luffy Gear 5 — the second his Satan Fruit powers awaken. The brand new transformation basically turns Luffy right into a Looney Tune, making a spell-binding pastiche of recent anime with Nineteen Forties Golden Age American animation tropes, full with period-appropriate sound results. Nothing else just like the Gear 5 sequences exists in media — within the particular methods it references different types, it feels completely new.
Which is nice, since Gear 5 is important to the story. Gear 5 is the power-up that each one the 1,000-plus episodes of deliberate progress have been main as much as. Luffy is now highly effective sufficient to grow to be an emperor of the ocean. The truth that Gear 5 is utterly ridiculous and decidedly un-macho may be very a lot the purpose; as a substitute of One Piece’s largest climax in its 25-year historical past being a straight-up present of shonen-typical power, it’s a celebration of humor and creativeness. With this ridiculous power-up in hand, Luffy is now an Emperor of the Sea.
That main shift of Luffy’s standing, which makes him one of many 4 strongest pirates on this planet, propels One Piece into the Egghead Arc, which is the primary set up in its remaining saga. Now that Luffy’s an emperor, the one top left for him to realize is to search out the One Piece and grow to be King of the Pirates — until another person nabs it first. The second Wano ends, everybody — even Shanks — begins making severe strikes towards the titular treasure. Luffy additionally has a dream past turning into Pirate King, however anime watchers will discover out about that quickly.
If you happen to zoom out to the bigger developments at play throughout Wano’s four-year tenure, it’s fairly poetic that this evolution of the lead character occurred in the identical 4 years throughout which One Piece achieved new heights of worldwide recognition. If you happen to take social media at its phrase, lots of people used COVID quarantine as a possibility to atone for One Piece (responsible). 2022’s One Piece Movie: Crimson elbowed previous a number of Miyazaki movies to grow to be the sixth-highest-grossing movie of all time on the Japanese field workplace. Mangaka Eiichiro Oda noticed Netflix’s live-action adaptation as his final alternative to make One Piece catch on within the West — and it broke data, was renewed after a mere two weeks, and impressed much more newcomers to strive the anime or manga. For 25 years, Luffy has famously referred to as out, “I’m going to be King of the Pirates!” However Wano is the arc the place Luffy really turns into Pirate King inheritor obvious, each inside the world and past it.
The tip results of the real-life One Piece ardour is finest exemplified by the truth that Luffy had a float within the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this 12 months. Wano accompanied all of it, bringing the anime itself into the best echelons of recent anime. One Piece will quickly journey from Edo Japan into the very totally different realms of science fiction. Even One Piece should change, however Wano actually modified the anime for the higher.
