One Piece Reveals New Character Designs for Anime’s High School Makeover

One Piece has always been an insanely popular series that follows an unlikely band of pirates looking for fame and fortune. The company, Nissin Foods, decided to re-imagine the Straw Hat Pirates in an entirely new light to promote their brand under the “Hungry Days” logo. Taking the anime characters and re imagining them as high schoolers, the company has released new designs for the pirates in this pseudo-teen drama.

The Straw Hat Pirates have an idiosyncratic cast of characters, with the swashbuckler Zoro taking center stage here. We’re not entirely sure how effective holding a kendo stick in his teeth is here but hey, whatever works for him! Training to become the best in his Kendo class, Zoro encounters other, newly designed characters he knew in the reality we all know as One Piece. In the final beat of the trailer, he comes into contact with the main character, Luffy, who is still surrounded by shadow, leaving fans to wonder what this new interpretation of Munkey would look like.

While initial designs were released for a few characters, fans where “chomping at the bit” to see one made for Chopper, the youngest pirate on the ship of Straw Hats who also happens to be a reindeer. Seen here as a human teenager, we’re also given new designs for the former pirates, now teenagers, Robin, Franky, Mihawk, and Brook.

Nissin Foods also had a number of other “re-imaginings” released to promote its “Cup Noodle” brand, including the following anime: Kiki’s Delivery Service, Heidi, and Girl of the Alps. Based on the reception to this recent One Piece collaboration, perhaps we’ll be seeing this world released as its own anime or movie in the future?

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.

What do you all think of the Hungry Days collaboration so far? Is this new take on One Piece as high schoolers something that you’d like to see explored in the future? Let us know in the comments or feel free to hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics and anime.