Eiichiro Oda's One Piece manga started serialization in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. Having taken off as quite a successful manga, it was only a matter of time before the story got an anime adaptation which has, since then, been going strong. Handled by a very talented staff at Toei Animation, the One Piece anime appears to be well-liked in the community but, at the same time, has been splitting opinion for decades.
Due to various reasons, most of which had to do with the anime's subpar production quality, especially from Punk Hazard onwards, the One Piece manga was overwhelmingly favored by the majority of the fans, and rightly so. That said, however, the One Piece anime has stepped things up considerably in recent years, and it has much more to offer than it did in the past, which is why fans should consider giving it a chance.
The Big Changes Made To The One Piece Anime
Often, a big misconception among anime fans is that the budget is what separates a great anime from the average ones. While budget is certainly important to an extent, it doesn't play as big a role in determining the quality of an anime as production time and schedule. For One Piece, the production schedule wasn't nearly as healthy after the timeskip which inevitably led to a severe drop in quality, especially towards the Dressrosa arc where episodes were extremely rough around the edges and the recaps took up nearly 7 minutes at times.
However, a big step in the right direction was taken with the Wano Country arc. With Toei veterans Tatsuya Nagamine, Aya Komaki, and Kohei Kureta taking over as series directors, a new life was breathed into the story. By this time, the One Piece anime had already managed to improve the production schedule by a significant margin. At the same time, a new studio for photography made things all the better, especially for a colorful country such as Wano. This, coupled with the fact that a very talented staff was slowly created to work on the series ensured that Wano was in the right hands and that the anime would go on to rival the manga, if not surpass it in terms of quality.
Why Manga Readers Should Watch The One Piece Anime
Evidently, One Piece made big leaps with the beginning of the Wano Country arc to a point where it eventually started drawing comparisons to movies in terms of quality. In fact, certain episodes of the One Piece anime, such as 957 and 982, directed by Megumi Ishitani, have been so incredible that it would be a disservice to call them anything but "movie-quality episodes." However, brilliant visuals are not all that make the anime worth watching.
The One Piece anime also does a great job at filling in things that Oda leaves out of his manga due to time constraints. Undoubtedly, working on a manga for 25 years is taxing and for Oda, the goal is to wrap the story up sooner rather than later. Consequently, Oda tends to not focus too much some lesser important parts of the chapter, which is where the anime shines. By tying the small events together and adding a new layer of depth to the story, the One Piece anime becomes the perfect supplement to the manga. Towards the end of the Dressrosa arc, fans saw Sabo's backstory being revealed in the anime. While this didn't happen in the manga, Eiichiro Oda made sure to provide the staff with detailed notes on the backstory, ensuring that the plot itself was canon.
More recently, the One Piece anime added further depth to the bond of Ace and Yamato when the two met in Wano Country, 4 years before the current timeline of events. As such, the anime doesn't shy away from adding a new depth to some of the most iconic characters in the story. That's not to say that the One Piece anime doesn't have its flaws, of course. A slow pacing still plagues most of the anime episodes, however, given the right direction, even a slow-paced episode turns out to be brilliant.
At the same time, the staff at Toei Animation that handles One Piece are massive fans of the series themselves. Their passion and love for the story are what has, in recent memory, lifted One Piece from an average anime to one of the very best long-running anime, if not the best. As fans, the staff ensures that the key moments in the story are done justice, such as the big reveals, the momentous occasions, and the most exuberant of fights. Unsurprisingly, One Piece keeps delivering brilliant episodes all year and will continue to do so, with the upcoming episode 1015 of the anime already setting itself up to be one of the very best episodes in the entire series.
While the anime does have its issues still, the amount of love that the staff puts into it and the incredible jump in quality that's taken place over the last few years to deliver some of the most memorable episodes is more than enough for manga fans to consider watching it on the side. The anime and the manga for One Piece have always been subject to unfair comparison. Instead, the two should be enjoyed side-by-side as both tell what is potentially the greatest story ever written in slightly different ways.