Arresting visual spectacle and superb fight scenes: Netflix’s One Piece reviewed

What would you say is the most successful comic-book series in history? If you’re thinking Tintin you’re not even close. (Curiously enough, even the now largely forgotten Lucky Luke scores higher.) If you’re thinking Peanuts, you’re getting warmer. And if you named Asterix, good try but that’s only number two. No, the hands-down winner, with total sales exceeding 516 million, is a Japanese manga called One Piece.

One Piece? Me neither. It’s quite unusual these days to chance upon a massive cultural phenomenon – the series has been going since 1997, with 1,093 chapters so far – of which one has never once even heard. But this, I suspect, will be the experience of most viewers approaching the Netflix adaptation.

The series is set in a fantasy world ruled by a world government and policed by implacable, yet curiously camp marines. Their arch-enemies are the swarms of pirates who infest the high seas, many of them in search of a mysterious lost treasure called ‘one piece’. Our hero is one of the few good pirates, a character called Monkey D. Luffy recognisable by his trademark straw hat and the fact that he is made of rubber, having inadvertently consumed a ‘devil fruit’.

As so often with Asian TV and comics, your main barrier is going to be the issue of tone. On the upside, the unfamiliar cultural reference points mean that you’ll be in no danger of going ‘I’ve seen all this before’, as you might with the overfamiliar tropes of western TV drama. But on the downside you may find the sudden, unexpected shifts between whimsy, cuteness, awkward humour, earnestness and Grand-Guignol horror a bit unsettling, as though you are in one of those dream/nightmares where you’re not quite sure of the rules, or how much you are enjoying it.

To start off with, I wasn’t sure about Luffy (Inaki Godoy) – so insufferably cheerful, so irritatingly stretchy and bouncy, so relentlessly, irksomely optimistic that one day he will be King of the Pirates.