One Piece Shows-Off New Art Style in Wano Trailer

One Piece fans have been divided over the anime’s adaptation of the Reverie arc. Though the arc has resulted in major reveals about the darker nature of the New World, each episode has been filled with extended flashbacks and has definitely turned many fans away from the series for the last few weeks. But with the debut of the trailer for the upcoming Wano Country arc of the anime, fans will definitely be coming back to the anime in droves.

One of the biggest reasons the Wano Country arc has gotten attention through its brief teaser is the complete visual overhaul of the series, which is the result of a few major changes for the anime’s production.

Tatsuya Nagamine, director for Dragon Ball Super: Broly and One Piece Film: Z, will be taking over as series director for the One Piece anime beginning with the Wano Country arc and there are some changes that can be attributed to him right away. Though it’s not completely clear by this trailer, the color palette of the series seems to have shifted to make the anime pop even more than what has come before.

Unfortunately, Nagamine is the only major staffer confirmed for the Wano arc but there are other staff changes that have shifted the art style of the series. Character designs have seemingly been changed, and this coupled with the line work in this trailer is more akin to the upcoming One Piece: Stampede. There’s no telling whether or not the series will be this close to movie quality every week, but this is a great foot forward for the anime.

With the major overhaul apparent in this trailer for the upcoming arc, it seems like Reverie might have been a necessary sacrifice to put all of the team’s efforts with Wano. Though this is all merely speculation until the new staff is confirmed, the changes to the anime should inject a good amount of energy into the series for sure.

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.