Better Still: Episode 1, “Romance Dawn”
One Piece is a ridiculous show. The concept sounds simple enough — young man wants to be a pirate, goes and does it — but the details are crazy. Our lead character, Monkey D. Luffy, isn’t just a precocious would-be pirate king; he’s a precocious pirate king who is essentially made of rubber and can stretch his limbs to ludicrous lengths. He ate a magic fruit when he was a kid so now he can do this. I already mentioned the cat pirates, and they’re among the more conservative pirates we meet. People in this universe apparently communicate using living snail-like creatures as telephones. And every other person’s hair is a kind of heretofore undiscovered radioactive color.
One Piece is based on an anime, and anime are known for these kinds of wild, exaggerated features. The accomplishment of Netflix’s series is that it preserves many of these features in live-action form, and yet somehow doesn’t look ridiculous. Once your eyes adjust, it all sort of coheres.
And once you’re in, you can start marveling at the design. Early in this series premiere, we see the ship of a pirate captain named Alvida, which has a huge bird masthead and giant pink hearts on the sails. One Piece commits to this gaudy excess so completely that it becomes delightful rather than cringeworthy.
The performances are like that too. As Monkey D. Luffy, Iñaki Godoy is boundlessly enthusiastic in a way that you’d think might get annoying, but his joy is infectious and eventually you just let it take you away.
That’s basically what happens to characters like Kobe, Zoro and Nami, all of whom we meet in this episode, which revolves around Luffy trying to break into a Marine base and steal a treasure map. There are a lot of moving parts to this premiere, and while it’s fun, it can be a lot to take in as the show tries to introduce us to so much so fast.
Still, this is a confident premiere episode that clearly knows what it wants to do. The follow-up episode might be even better, or at least more memorable…