One Piece

Director
Eiichiro Oda
Production
Shueisha, Fuji TV, Toei
Country of origin
Japan
Format
Series
Year
1999

One Piece

By Rock Lee
21st May 04

One piece is a wierd anime. It's also one of the top 10 favorite and most watched anime in japan at the moment, rivaling long-time rating grabbers like Doraemon and Sazae-san.

What makes One Piece special? It's direction. The epic that is One Piece begins by throwing you a main character that is dull, Period. When you have a dull character, you have room for a LOT of comedy. The first ~60 episodes portray this well, with plent of comedy, to a point when you can't watch an ep without bursting out laughing before anything funn even happens.

That's not to say OP is some sort of comedy anime. It's based on the manga of the same name, which runs weekly in Shounen Jump. The manga too is a VERY FUNNY, very good manga, but i won't talk too much about it. Being a shounen anime, one of the key components, like hits such as Naruto, Dragonball Z Japanese version, HunterXHunter, Yu YU Hakasho, Saint Seiya, Inuyasha, Ranma 1/2, and more, is having well scripted, strong fights. One Piece pulls this off BEAUTIFULLY.

Every Fighting anime has some sort of "special" ability, right? Like the powers of ninjas, out-of-nowhere Ki techniques, and random revivals to life by the story *cough*Excel Saga*cough*. But what do Pirates have? Absulutely nothing special. However, Oda Eiichiro threw in something called Devil Fruits. The idea is pretty cliche, but well done in OP. These devil fruits are 1-2 syllable repeated (Gomu Gomu, Bara Bara, Baka Baka) treasures which pirates find and eat to gain silly or phsycho powers, at the cost of never being able to swim, ever again.

The dull main character, Luffy, eats a Gomu Gomu (Rubber) Fruit, which makes his body Elastic preceeeding the show. And thus he begins his LONG adventure to find "One Piece", the worlds best treasure, which the owner of will become Kaizoku (pirate) King. No one really knows what one piece is, the only information at the begining is that the Pirate King Gold Roger hid his most valuable treasure at the end of a deadly ocean called the grand line.

As the show progresses, Luffy finding One Piece becomes an unimportant goal to the veiwer, as the story molds into character development and REALLY well done arcs with intruige filled side stories. The Alabasta Arc is a great example of this, it slowly makes One Piece the #1 GREATEST show ever.

What are you doing at site like this? GO WATCH ONE PIECE!!!

10/10

-- Rock Lee 21st May 04

One Piece Images