Pirate and his crew – Weekend
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The “One Piece” series, with a rating of 14+, about non-scary cartoon pirates copied from Japanese shonen manga, was released on Netflix and immediately became a hit.
The most amazing thing about this story is that adults watch it with pleasure. Moreover, the material here is openly and shamelessly childish: shonen is a genre of adventure stories for underage boys. These are not adults “Black Sails” and not even the comedic, not childishly satirical “Our Flag Means Death” by Taika Waititi – but come on: wild success with an audience that is difficult to suspect of consisting entirely of minors.
The main character of the story, the boy Monkey D. Luffy (Iñaki Godoy), has dreamed since childhood of becoming a pirate and finding the One Piece treasure (Snatch), hidden somewhere by the legendary pirate Gol D. Roger. Roger was publicly executed by the Marines, and he shouted into the crowd about the treasure – and then, instead of intimidating and turning the people away from sea robbery, the authorities received a wild influx of people wanting to sail the seas under the pirate flag. Luffy idolizes the pirate Shanks (Peter Gadiot), wears the straw hat he inherited from him and has super strength – as a child the guy ate a Devil Fruit, and now his body and limbs can stretch like rubber. The gray-haired vice-admiral of the Marines, Garp (Vincent Regan), is passionately chasing Luffy across all the seas – there are reasons for this. And Luffy, a gutta-percha simpleton with a heart of gold, as usual, gets a pirate map that will help in finding treasures, and along the way acquires a crew.
This very team consists of remarkable young men and women obsessed with childhood dreams: the pretty red-haired girl Nami (Emily Rudd) really needs that very card (and she is a first-class thief!), the virtuoso sword fighter, the pretty Roronoa Zoro (Makanu) dreams of becoming the best swordsman in world, the cowardly cutie Usopp (Jacob Gibson) is always making up tall tales about his pirate exploits and wants them to become true, and the handsome chef Sanji (Taz Skylar) wants to find the legendary All-Blue Sea, where all the food and spices exist at once. All of them are terribly attractive, cute and as if drawn, as it should be in a manga, but the secret of the series’ appeal, apparently, lies in the details: the setting of this pirate fairy tale is invented and embodied so inventively that it is impossible to get bored.
Just look at snailcophones – big-eyed snails that are used instead of telephones and bullhorns. Snails have a telepathic connection with each other; When the snail phone rings, it makes a funny “bullet” sound. It’s impossible to describe, you have to see it. And what colorful villains there are in the series! For example, the clown pirate Buggy (Jeff Ward) looks like the fruit of love between the Joker and the Black Orchid and has the ability to fall apart and come back together – for half the series the heroes carry around his talking head in a bag. This character would look great in our cartoon “Treasure Island” (1988) with game inserts with live actors – there is the same mixture of convention and reality. But when fish-men appear closer to the end, all previous inventions have to make room. Their leader Arlong (McKinley Belcher III) is a man with a fin protruding from his back and a jagged nose: “I am a fish called Saw, I saw whatever I find in the ocean, and soon your schooner will split in half under the sharp saw!” He is accompanied by other fish-like creatures that look like victims of plastic surgery – such a mixture of the familiar and the ugly that you can’t take your eyes off. This gutta-percha world of the series, which, like the main character, bends and stretches in all directions, evokes a feeling of pleasant weightlessness, detachment from reality. It is probably this exciting escapism that attracts adult audiences to what is essentially a children’s spectacle.
It should be noted that the non-children’s episode occurs only in the sixth episode, when a cruel pirate who ends up on a desert island with Sanji gives all the food to the child and eats his own leg. But in general, against the backdrop of the cuteness of the main characters, even Jack Sparrow from a non-adult franchise would look like a criminal at a children’s party. Here everything is neatly tailored to minor ratings: Netflix beat Disney like a child in its own field of self-censorship (the notorious “Hays Code”, which castrated Hollywood cinema from the 30s to the end of the 60s, was also not imposed from above by the state, but voluntarily accepted by studios). No sensuality, zero nudity, all cruelty is squeezed out of the frame – such a story sells perfectly to both children and gravity-weary adult audiences.
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