One Piece’s Wano arc was when the anime finally lived up to the manga
Nearly four and a half years after it started, A piece's Wano Country Arc is ready. The story moves to a new island, and A piece itself finds itself in a whole new world. During those four years I personally gave up on it A piece curious to A piece from hard to professional A piece expert. And yet, when the new promotional image for the upcoming Egghead Arc hits my screen in January, it will be the first time ever that I won't be greeted by Monkey D. Luffy grinning in a threadbare kimono.
But it's not just me or the promotional art that will have changed in the intervening years between the start and end of Wano – it's not even just the world, since Wano was there to absorb the whole COVID experience. The A piece anime itself, A piece's story and audience have all undergone major changes. And the anime version of the Wano arc, which ended about a year after the manga, was the main thread underneath.
The biggest shift within the anime production was clearly within the first frames of the arc itself. Since time immemorial (i.e. around the early 2000s), many manga fans have claimed that the low production quality was the main reason they couldn't stand the anime. This is not to say that there were none incredible sequencesfew would dispute that for most of the 2000s and 2010s A piece's animation largely lagged behind its peers. After all, it is a weekly show all year round. But still: “when A piece animation will be good” is an auto-completed question on Google. But the answer is: the opening moments of Wano.
In a single moment, A piece suddenly feels like a different show. Wano explodes onto your screen in a shower of cherry blossom petals. The color palette suddenly expands and the animation itself suddenly feels more detailed. There is a fluidity and vibrancy on your screen A piece never had before at that time. By the way, it's also accompanied by one of the catchiest musical cues in the series' history: viz Real says something.
The team at Toei Animation also makes some truly inspired decisions when polishing the manga. Wano is clearly intended as a love letter to Japan, with the island of Wano itself essentially representing the Edo period. The manga plays with fashion, mythology, history, and entertainment archetypes, but the anime steps up and adds an extra layer of music and theater. The anime uses the framework of a kabuki play to overlay a three-act structure over the entire arc, bringing out Kabuki's famous multi-colored curtain to mark the beginning and end of each act. In the final episode of the arc, the show tells its biggest battle through a bunraku performance, in which a singer/narrator is accompanied by shamisen.
Once we reach the action-packed second half of Wano – the attack on Onigashima – A piece's animation went a huge step further: now the series allowed animators to create highly stylized sequences that clearly contained an individualistic watermark. The resulting experiment delivered some of the most visually stunning action scenes from recent years.
The features kept coming. Episode 1,015, which adapts the manga's thousandth chapter, is itself the best episode of the series, and perhaps one of the best anime episodes ever made. Few shows can demonstrate in the course of one episode how much the main character has grown and how much closer he is to achieving his dream. Episode director Megumi Ishitani not only executes this monumental feat effectively, but she gracefully complements the chapter's events with beautiful, emotional scenes that demonstrate that growth arguably more effectively than even the manga.
It's no surprise that more and more fans who previously only consumed manga say they're tuning into the anime, at least for key episodes. The series also won Best Continuing Series at the 2023 Crunchyroll Anime Awards, a well-deserved recognition for its increasingly adventurous animation.
But Wano's crown jewel is Luffy Gear 5 – the moment when his Devil Fruit powers awaken. The new transformation essentially turns Luffy into a Looney Tune, creating a mesmerizing pastiche of modern anime with 1940s Golden Age American animation styles, complete with appropriate sound effects. There's nothing else like the Gear 5 sequences in media – the specific way it references other styles makes it feel completely new.
That's good, since Gear 5 is essential to the story. Gear 5 is the power-up to which all thousand-plus episodes of purposeful growth led. Luffy is now powerful enough to become Emperor of the Sea. The fact that Gear 5 is completely ridiculous and decidedly non-macho is exactly the point; instead of A piece's biggest climax in its 25-year history is a veritable show of shonen-typical power, it's a celebration of humor and imagination. With this ridiculous power-up in hand, Luffy is now an Emperor of the Sea.
That major shift in Luffy's status, which makes him one of the four most powerful pirates in the world, ensures that A piece in the Egghead Arc, the first installation in his latest saga. Now that Luffy is an Emperor, the only height he can reach is to find the One Piece and become King of the Pirates – unless someone else gets it first. The second Wano ends, everyone – even Shanks – starts making serious moves towards the titular treasure. Luffy also has a dream past Become a Pirate King, but anime viewers will soon find out.
When you zoom out to the larger trends at play during Wano's four-year tenure, it's quite poetic that this evolution of the main character took place during the same four years that A piece reached new heights of international popularity. If you take social media at its word, many people have used the COVID quarantine as an opportunity to catch up A piece (guilty). 2022 One-piece film: red surpassed several Miyazaki films to become the sixth highest-grossing film of all time at the Japanese box office. Mangaka Eiichiro Oda saw Netflix's live-action adaptation as his last chance to make it A piece catching on in the West – and it records broken, was renewed after just two weeks and inspired even more newcomers to try the anime or manga. For 25 years, Luffy has been shouting the famous statement: “I will be King of the Pirates!” But Wano is the arc where Luffy truly becomes the heir apparent to Pirate King, both in and out of the world.
The end result of real life A piece passion is best exemplified by the fact that Luffy had a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this year. Wano guided it all and brought the anime itself to the highest echelons of modern anime. A piece will soon travel from Edo Japan to the very different realms of science fiction. Even A piece needs to change, but Wano certainly changed the anime for the better.