Pixar's One Piece Movie Is Too Good To Be True
Despite what Netflix may want you to believe with its roguishly charming live-action adaptation, "One Piece" is a mature anime. It's goofy and flirty but also bloody and vicious, and a lot of people die, which also makes it not exactly the perfect fit for a Pixar remake. Yet that's exactly what one artist wanted to see: on his Instagram, digital artist Ben Mornin used an AI program called Midjourney to create a photoset that features some of the main characters from Eiichiro Oda's piratical epic in the traditional Pixar aesthetic. The results are both cute and just a little creepy.
Mornin's art includes Pixar-ified versions of Monkey D. Luffy, Roronoa Zoro, Nami, Usopp, Sanji, and Koby. Since Luffy is already made out of rubber, the style change works, although his forced smile suggests that the young pirate captain is actively trying to hide a dead body. Zoro's grumpy demeanor translates into the new medium surprisingly well, and it's easy to imagine him making this exact face whenever Luffy opens his mouth to say something truly out of pocket. Nami suffers a bit because her hair and her earrings are melding together, but otherwise she's also rocking the redesign.
Usopp and Sanji lost a little something during the process. Both appear ... haunted. By the looks of them, Usopp's accidentally ingested some of the Joker's laughing gas and someone has shown Sanji exactly how he dies. On a positive note, Mornin's version of Koby is so perfectly Pixar that it's hard to believe the little guy isn't already starring in his own coming-of-age film.
One Piece isn't Pixar but it is everything else
"One Piece" began life as a manga — an ongoing manga with no end in sight — before spawning a massive media empire. While it's never been officially adapted into something similar to Ben Mornin's Pixar art style, Eiichiro Oda's story has seen its fair share of varying mediums. Aside from the manga, "One Piece" encompasses an ongoing anime, made-for-TV movies, an ongoing live-action Netflix series, an ongoing book series, a staggering number of video games, a handful of stage plays, and even a Japanese theme park. The manga and the anime are built using the same art style but everything else kind of exists in its own realm. In fairness to Mornin's AI work, the "One Piece" video games are often fashioned using 3D CGI, meaning his Pixar reskin isn't totally out of left field.
What's more, Mornin is in good company because a number of online artists also want to see "One Piece" translated into a Pixar-adjacent style. Googling the key term "One Piece Pixar" generates a flood of content that ranges from AI mock-ups to YouTube videos to speculative Reddit memes. The TikTok search page pulls up posters for hypothetical Pixar "One Piece" projects, as well as some chibi models for Tony Tony Chopper and Red-Haired Shanks. The truth is that Oda's pirates will probably never become a Pixar property, which would require the protective creator to allow Disney control over his characters. He barely allowed Netflix access, so why would he open up to the Mouse and his subsidiaries?