Answerman

All Killer, No Filler and The One Piece Question

Sleepless in Shibuya asks:

Why wasn't Toei asked to produce the brand new 'The One Piece' anime for Netflix? And what's with sticking 'The' at the front of everything?

Was Toei jilted? Kind of. But also, not in the way some people may think. In researching this topic, I have discovered that what I thought I knew about the future of The One Piece anime universe, and all of the complex business relationships that surround it, was, for the most part, wrong. And I call myself an “Industry Insider.” Ha! Time to reprint my business card.

The full story about why there is a brand new “re-telling” of what is one of the most popular manga ever published in the history of the world is considerably more interesting than the fan discourse around it would suggest.

Let me start with the misconception most fans are carrying. Toei Animation was not cut out of The One Piece. The production committee for the project - the seisaku iinkai, the consortium of stakeholders who co-own the IP and share in its exploitation - consists of representatives from Shueisha, Fuji Television Network, and Toei Animation. Toei is at the table. What they don't have this time is the animation contract. That went to Wit Studio instead. The really interesting question is, what is the distance between those two things: committee seat versus production studio?

The official answer from George Wada, Wit Studio's president, is clear. The impetus for the remake came from Oda himself. He reflected on how the work had become very long and rich in detail, and specifically worried that the anime, which started in 1999, featured visual styles that might be difficult for younger audiences accustomed to modern production techniques to adopt and engage with. I have personally interpreted this to mean that, to brand new eyes, the original series looks dated. When examining the very early production budgets for the first season of the series, and rewatching those episodes, it isn't difficult to understand why.

Wit's assignment is to go back and adapt from the very beginning, with tighter pacing, no unnecessary stretching, and an assured animation quality that can proudly be associated with their work on Attack on Titan, SPY x FAMILY, and Vinland Saga. The two projects are officially parallel tracks. Toei reportedly told the remake team, "Please do your best, and we will continue to do our best with the latest episodes." Very diplomatic. Very Japanese. Moving on.

What the official answers don't communicate is that Oda's concern about "early episodes" looking dated is legitimate and real. Episode 1 from 1999 is a visual document of its time. But applying that concern as a justification for handing the remake to a different studio requires quietly ignoring what Toei has been doing since 2019.

The Wano Country Arc was a genuine production transformation. Before it began, Toei received a confirmed budget increase specifically for One Piece. At the time, it was something chief animation director Keiichi Ichikawa acknowledged directly in interviews. New series director Tatsuya Nagamine was brought in from Dragon Ball Super: Broly. Character designer Midori Matsuda produced designs that tracked Oda's modern artwork far more closely than anything preceding them. Overseas outsourcing was reduced; critical sequences were kept in-house. The results were extraordinary.

Episode 1015, directed by Megumi Ishitani, is widely considered one of the greatest single episodes in the history of anime. Not One Piece specifically, but the medium. That is a tremendous accolade for any anime production team. Then came episode 1071, the Gear 5 transformation, in August 2023, which is now widely considered to be a landmark piece of animation. It deliberately adopted Oda's cartoony, rubbery, wildly expressive aesthetic in a way that felt like the definitive realization of his creative intent on screen. Fans and critics were unanimous in their praise, and it set a new quality benchmark for the entire series moving forward. Today, One Piece, by any measure, is one of the finest action animations being produced anywhere in the industry.

The Wit Studio announcement came four months later, in December 2023. I was going to write that the announcement timing was unfortunate, but it was deliberate, because Shueisha's Jump Festa event happens at the same time every year. It was deliberate in terms of making a big, splashy, marketing announcement since Jump Festa is the ideal setting to announce new Shonen Jump anime projects. But it was not a deliberate move in terms of signalling anything deeper about the relationship between the historical One Piece anime production committee members.

Corporate communications is a science, and sometimes, even the best intentions can go awry, because ultimately, “control” is an illusion. I do wish corporations would understand this. Especially in the world of entertainment, fandom, and anime.

Toei produced what is arguably the greatest version of Gear 5 conceivable. It is a piece of animation that understood Oda's vision at the deepest creative level, and months later, the official narrative became: Toei's anime has "outdated elements," and the franchise needs a fresh start. Like I said, unfortunate.

I am trying to outline for you a clear distinction between intent and outcome, and here is where the story gets really interesting. Cast your mind back to 2019. The same year the Wano arc began, and Toei started their quality investment into The One Piece anime, an “unofficial” project called the Buster Call Project emerged online. It presented itself as a volunteer fan initiative, sharply critical of existing One Piece derivative works, particularly the anime, merchandise, and licensees. It called them out as unsatisfactory and argued that they were actively preventing the franchise from reaching younger generations drawn to street culture and contemporary pop music. The target of this criticism was explicit: Toei Animation, Bandai Namco, and Fuji TV. Ouch!

Would you be surprised to learn that it was later revealed by Shueisha itself that the Buster Call Project had been run by the editorial department of Weekly Shonen Jump all along? Shueisha issued an apology for describing the project as "unofficial" and for the caustic language used by the project manager, who turned out to be a Shueisha employee.

To understand why any of this matters, you have to understand what Toei actually built over the past 26 years.

The One Piece manga was popular in Japan before the anime launched, but it was not a global franchise. The merchandise ecosystem, the international licensing revenues, the theatrical box office, and the Netflix deal on which Oda serves as executive producer were built almost entirely on the anime's distribution infrastructure. Western audiences discovered Luffy through Toei's weekly production, not through Shueisha's tankōbon. The brand equity that made a US$136 million live-action Netflix adaptation commercially viable, and an IP in its own right. The anime built that. Toei's production was underpaid, over-extended, and structurally constrained by a weekly broadcast slot it was contractually obligated to fill - regardless of whether there was manga content ready to adapt. It was nonetheless the commercial engine that made One Piece a global phenomenon.

That slot constraint, by the way, is the structural explanation for everything fans call "filler" - a word they use as a creative critique when it's actually describing an industrial and economic reality. The slot generates advertising revenue, funds Toei's production pipeline, and keeps hundreds of staff employed. You don't go dark on a Fuji TV primetime slot because you've run out of manga chapters. You produce something. The manga gap is the occasion for filler; the slot economics are the cause. Most Western fans evaluate this as a creative failure. It's actually a labour economics solution that has been running for a quarter-century, and I really wish those folks would get over it.

Toei knew the model was broken. The shift to 26 episodes per year and production hiatuses are their own tacit acknowledgement of that. But the franchise's accumulated global value - the thing that put Shueisha in a room with Netflix and let them command the terms they commanded - was built on that broken model, by those constrained workers, across more than a thousand weekly episodes.

The uncomfortable truth is this. Shueisha has used the brand equity that the Toei anime created to position itself for a streaming future in which Toei is no longer the essential intermediary. The WIT/Netflix pipeline gives Shueisha direct access to global audiences without needing to route through Toei's international licensing infrastructure. Toei remains on the committee, drawing its proportional share. But they're no longer holding the brush on the prestige product, for the first time in the franchise's history, and it is OK to wonder if that stings a little.

Nobody was formally jilted. But somebody is definitely sitting further from the window than they used to be.

The second part of your question sounds like a grammatical quirk, but I think it is pointing at something important. A pattern in recent years has emerged. “The One Piece.” “The Ghost in the Shell.” “The Batman.” Franchises with established, iconic titles are acquiring a new iteration that slots a definite article in front of the existing name. Why?

The Ghost in the Shell, which debuts on Amazon Prime Video on July 7, 2026, takes its title directly from the original Masamune Shirow manga, which carried the romanized subtitle The Ghost in the Shell from 1989. Shirow put it there himself, and Science SARU's new version is explicitly returning to the origin with a tonally lighter, more irreverent, more sexy, cyberpunk gag manga flex than any previous adaptation. In this instance, “The” signals that this is where it actually started: a declaration of fidelity to the source material.

The One Piece is doing something adjacent, but distinct. It's not "One Piece: Remastered" or "One Piece: Origins.” Any subtitle would position it as subsidiary, or as a spin-off - a lesser product. By calling it The One Piece, the project makes a stronger claim that this is the definitive One Piece anime. The essential one. The one that counts.

The Batman (2022) works similarly. A character with so many iterations that the definite article functions as a reset assertion. Not a Batman. Not another Batman. The Batman, underscored. "BAM!", "POW!", "BIFF!"

The pattern, when you see it, is coherent because brands that have become so large and so polysemous (My word of the week!), across so many versions, with so much accumulated meaning along the way, use "The" as a signal of primacy. It's a way of saying, without saying it directly: whatever came before, start here.

In the streaming era, where two or three simultaneous versions of the same IP can live on different platforms for different audiences, differentiation is necessary. For One Piece alone, you have Toei's ongoing series on Fuji TV domestically and Crunchyroll and Netflix globally, WIT's remake on Netflix, the Netflix live-action exclusive, and the announced OP live-action LEGO specials. It is a lot, and the humble definite article has become a piece of competitive positioning. Language, as always, is the last thing to admit what business already knows.

Do YOU have a question for the Answerman?

We'd love to answer your questions and especially encourage questions inspired by recent news and headlines. However, READ THIS FIRST:
● CHECK THE ARCHIVES. Over the years, we've answered THOUSANDS of questions and might have already answered yours!
● We cannot tell you if or when a show will get another season, nor can we help you get in touch with any producers, artists, creators, actors, or licensors.
● Only submit your question once.
● We take questions by email only. (Tweeted questions get ignored!)
● Please keep your questions within a paragraph length.
●The email address is [email protected].

Thank you!