Review - One Piece, Season 1

One Piece, Season 1, ran for 61 episodes, and I watched it over the period of several months, finishing that first leg of the series ealier this week. What attracted me to the series was having seen One Piece: Red in the theater last summer. At that point, My Bonnie Bride and I had no clue about what the heck was going on or anything about the many characters in the film. Thus, finding it was available on Hulu in an English dub, I set out to watch the series, and I am glad I did. NOTE – there will be some minor spoilers as I explore the reasons why I like this series.

If you are not familiar with the series (and you can skip this paragraph if you are familiar with it) is about a young man, Monkey D. Luffy, who wants to become King of the Pirates, just like the first King of the Pirates, Gol D. Roger. Luffy has many adventures during the start of his (not exactly) piratical career and manages to gather several people around him as both crew and friends. That’s the general plot of the series. We also get a lot of backstory for the major characters and a view of their world and how it works, and their world has a lot of depth to it. It is no wonder that it is one of the most popular series in both Anime and Manga. Eiichiro Oda has done a magnificent job of weaving an interesting story and world together, it has become hard to not want more.

The important part of the stories are the major themes that run through the series, and the first two are closely intertwined with each other: friendship and loyalty. As he meets and becomes friends with people, and they choose to join him on his quest, we learn the importance of friendship to Luffy. Once he decides that someone is his friend, they learn just what kind of a good guy he is. Take Nami, for instance – she is reluctant to accept his friendship at the start, and even betrays their friendship stealing their ship, The Going Merry; but as her own backstory unfolds, she finds that she regrets her actions and is surprised when Luffy, Zoro, Sanji and Usopp come to her aid. In fact, one of the more telling scenes is when Luffy tells her “You will always be my friend”. I am paraphrasing there a bit. However, that shows how important friendship, true friendship is important to the main characters and results in their loyalty to Luffy and to each other, just as Luffy is completely loyal to his friends. And they are more friends than crew. Also, it shows how friendship binds them together throughout the various trials they go through on their own personal quests and adventures together, each one contributing to the others in the group. And they are completely loyal to each other, willing to go the extra mile to help their friends, although Nami is still a bit of a mercenary at heart when it comes to money. But, hey, we all have little quirks.

I think that the third major theme is self-sacrifice, and the reason for that is Luffy consistently puts his life on the line, even to the point of possibly dying, to help not just his friends and crewmates, but for others as well, even those who initially great him with suspicion as he is so open about being a pirate (yet he doesn’t do anything that is really piratical in nature, except beating up Marines set out to fight pirates). He suffers some pretty serious wounds, and at several times nearly dies while the rest of his companions try to figure out how to save him.

Those are some of the reasons I find One Piece to be an enjoyable series, and you may find it so as well. There are other reasons as well. Although the animation is not cinematic in quality, it is of a good quality, and complemented by excellent artwork.

The story, however is king, and it is heavily character driven as we learn about the various characters and the world they live in. Luffy, being the main character of the series, is a bit more complex than you realize at first, and his staunch loyalty and the ease with which he makes friends his due to his childhood interactions with Red-Haired Shanks, another pirate who befriended Luffy years earlier. Shanks has an easy-going way about him for the most part, and even puts his life out on the limb for Luffy, thus embedding that same type of characteristic on Luffy. There is a fair amount of action, and a lot of cliffhangers throughout each story-line as we proceed through the series, although sometimes the pacing of the story can be a bit slow while we learn about who all these different people are, and not just Luffy and company, but the many bad guys they battle as well. It’s all good stuff.

I probably identify with Zoro and Sanji best – Zoro for swordsmanship (I used to do a fair amount of fencing in college, and sword fighting in the SCA once upon a time); Sanji because I enjoy cooking and am pretty good at it (the main reason My Bonnie Bride keeps me around). In fact, I am toying with putting together a suitable rig to be Sanji sometime, or maybe even Gold Roger as then I wouldn’t have to shave my mustache.

One thing to note, for an animated series, it is not child friendly as there is a lot of profanity being slung around. Maybe this is normal Anime/Manga style, but this needs to be pointed out that it may not be suitable for younger minds. Teenagers, on the other hand, if they are like I was, they won’t learn any new naughtly words. They’ve heard them all by now.

That’s it for this time around. If you have seen One Piece, please feel free to tell me what you like about it, or write a post discussing it. I would like to hear what others think about it One Piece.

Thanks for stopping by.

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