One Piece Does the Impossible

It's adapted from an anime and it works.

- ANGELICA JADE BASTIEN

ONE PIECE THE LONG-RUNNING manga and ongoing anime from the mind of Eiichiro Oda-is a joyfully weird, ecstatically singular masterpiece bent toward a politics of liberation and care, and it's exactly the kind of thing that seems impossible to translate into the hardedged live-action storytelling that dominates mainstream American film and TV. The anime's more than 1,000 episodes take place in a seafaring universe of pirates, monsters, and fishmen in which the physics that control the human body are outright broken, characters grow hair the color of sea moss and sapphires, skyscraper-size dragons double as warlords, friendship is explored more than romance, and the globe is swallowed by the ocean. There is much to consider in adapting a setting so radically different from our own, but one question bubbled up just before I hit PLAY on Netflix's adaptation, which is among the streamer's most expensive shows to date: What are they going to do with the snails?