A matter of taste

Written by hajialibaig on March 18, 2012 at 9:13 PM

One Piece's art style is indeed unique and is definitely something that you do not see often in the mainstream anime these days. However, as original as the art may be, not everyone will like it. In fact, it does come as a bit unusual and weird in a way thanks to the anime's few short comings which I will summarize below:

1) One Piece started serialization way back in 1997, and let's face it: animation quality wasn't the best back then compared to what we have today), coupled with the fact that the artists had to mimic the manga's unique art style (which is much easier to draw in the manga, since you're only drawing stationary panels), whereas, animation is highly time consuming. End result: the first 40-50 episodes are very poor animation wise, the unique art style loses most of its good qualities and ends up being more or less butchered.

2) 4Kids: the original English anime adaption was very heavily edited, this unfortunately wrecked the plot, and made the whole thing seem like a total mess (with the horrible animation). Needless to say, it was a disaster. Many fans were traumatized forever because of this, even to this day.

3) The storytelling is cliche at best and lacks Western themes that are popular with teengers today (love, angst, drama, etc). One piece is strictly an action/adventure story.

4) The series is very long, which without a doubt is a major hindrance to those who want to begin watching or reading it (500+ episodes = hundreds of hours required).