@gyuukarubi:
I actually disagree. While some of the direction has been great and there have been some amazing cuts for big moments, the abysmal pacing and lack of fluid animation really take away from how frenetic Onigashima feels in the manga.
Toei just doesn’t seem to get that they have lightning in a bottle with One Piece. Everyone loves the manga, but the anime is unwatchable and ignores much of what makes the manga so great. Honestly, they’re reducing the financial potential of the series right now.
Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen proved what successes can be born from a production company and resources that actually care. But Toei, the most financially successful animation studio in Japan, doesn’t care to get it right. Terrible business move for overseas revenue.
In fact, I’d argue that the anime creates quite a few detractors of the series who actively tell friends to stay away because of the perceived lack of quality.
The thing is though…Onigashima is an arc that does benefit from slower pacing in some areas. Onigashima has a mega ton of sub plots going on at the same time, and although it has a lot of really cool and memorable ones, it has a lot that go on for far to long that just aren't great. I think the anime does have and currently has expanded on a few plotlines or moments that definitely benefitted from the increased spectacle. I think this episode, 1004, and 1006 are the very best examples when the anime does stuff right, but I generally think that can applied for most episodes generally in some way or the other.
This isn't to say that the One Piece anime is well paced. Its not, it is a massive slog of a show, but at the same time, its not a series that I think would work well with a 3 chapter per episode format like in some other shonens(namely because One Piece chapters are stupidly dense, with tons of cutaways every chapter which makes things difficult to follow even in the manga).
I'd also argue that something I do think the anime does improve upon from time to time is actual storytelling. For exampe, this episode is considered by most people to be vastly superior in the content it adapted due to actually giving characters like Yamato a percievable character arc that was otherwise totally lacking in the manga, which emphasized why she had such a strong connection with Ace. In the manga, its very abrupt, and doesn't have the same kind of emotional weight.
