Our first look at Netflix’s new One Piece anime shows how hard it is to adapt Oda’s opus

Netflix wanted to be in on the One Piece business — so much so that not only are they just doing live-action One Piece (with season 2 currently in production), they’re also working with Wit Studio to remake the One Piece anime.

The One Piece, said forthcoming anime that was first announced in December last year, would be running concurrently with the still airing One Piece anime. It seems like a great opportunity: One Piece has grown to a global phenomenon from the more modest early days of One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda’s first manga panels and the initially limited budget of the original anime. One Piece now means something different than One Piece then, and a new anime could add a bit of polish to those first chapters.

Of course, there’s a burden to that thought, too. The creative team at Wit wants very badly to get everything just right, as the new behind-the-scenes look at The One Piece above shows. That’s not always easy when the series you’re adapting has been running for 27 years, evolving both Oda’s style and the characters themselves. So how exactly do they capture what “One Piece” really is after all this time?

The answer to that contains multitudes: There’s props animators consulting real-life weapons and French food magazines; there’s the character designer who focused only on diligently recreating One Piece character sketches for 2 months; there’s the animator in charge of landscapes who practices Oda’s clouds on the reg to capture the “softness.”

Ultimately they are all trying their hardest while trying to take Oda’s notes on The One Piece to heart — namely that he wanted them all “to express” rather than copy and paste. It’s all quite cool to see, complete with behind-the-scenes looks at how they 3D render the town to explore angles and try to really capture the essence of One Piece.

One Piece certainly exists in rarefied air, and it’s cool that juice is being put into giving us the sort of behind-the-scenes look at anime production we’re not often afforded. Plus it’s just neat to hear why certain artists love certain characters — even if the answer is just: “Characters that smoke have really good poses.”

The One Piece is follow the same story as the manga, starting with the East Blue saga. The show will also be made in partnership with Shueisha, Fuji Television Network, and Toei Animation Co. (Toei makes the current anime series as well). The show still has no release date.