‘The One Piece’ First Trailer Arrives After Three Years of Waiting, and the Grand Line Has Never Looked Like This
Few anime properties carry the weight that ‘One Piece’ does. Since Eiichiro Oda first introduced Monkey D. Luffy and his misfit crew of pirates to readers of Weekly Shōnen Jump back in 1997, the story has grown into something almost incomprehensibly vast. The manga has sold more than 600 million copies globally as of early 2026, and the original anime adaptation, which premiered in 1999, has run for more than 20 seasons. That staggering legacy is precisely what makes any attempt to reimagine it from the beginning such a monumental undertaking, and also why fans have been watching ‘The One Piece’ with such breathless anticipation ever since it was announced.
‘The One Piece’ was first revealed at Jump Festa ’24 in December 2023, and fans have been waiting patiently for real footage ever since. The project is being handled by WIT Studio, the celebrated animation house known for producing titles such as ‘Attack on Titan,’ ‘Spy x Family,’ and ‘Vinland Saga,’ and from the earliest announcements it was clear this would be a completely fresh take rather than a simple remaster. The question was always whether the visuals would live up to the ambition behind them.
That question finally has a partial answer. The first official trailer for ‘The One Piece’ was released as part of Netflix’s showcase at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2026, and @DiscussingFilm was among the first to clock that it carries a February 2027 premiere on Netflix. The footage, which opens on the words “The man who attained everything the world had to offer,” gives viewers their first real animated look at Luffy’s world rebuilt from the ground up. Fan reactions to the trailer have been overwhelmingly positive, with many viewers praising the updated art style, cleaner character designs, and faithful recreation of key moments from the original story.
Season 1 will consist of seven episodes totaling around 300 minutes, adapting the first 50 chapters of the manga and concluding around Luffy’s first encounter with Sanji at the Baratie. All seven episodes will drop simultaneously, leaning into Netflix’s binge-friendly release model rather than a weekly rollout. The series is positioned as a new entry point for audiences who have long been curious about the franchise but found its thousand-plus episode count daunting.
The artistic groundwork behind that fresh entry point has been genuinely painstaking. WIT Studio’s character designer and chief animation director Kyoji Asano described spending two solid months doing nothing but tracing and studying Oda’s drawings before the team felt confident enough to commit to a visual direction, eventually reaching a level of quality that even the series director approved of. Meanwhile, WIT Studio CEO George Wada explained the deeper motivation driving the whole project, telling CBR that Oda himself felt a kind of regret that new generations of viewers, shaped by modern productions, might not feel the same excitement toward the older animation style, and that it was that sentiment from the manga’s creator that motivated the studio to take on the remake using techniques suited to today’s audiences.
Not all early reactions have been glowing, with some critics expressing concern that the visual approach leans on flat 3D animation in ways that may not satisfy viewers hoping for a more traditional hand-drawn aesthetic. Those debates are already underway online, and they are unlikely to cool before the show actually lands. Netflix also has the live-action ‘One Piece’ series set to return with its third season in 2027, meaning the streamer is clearly betting big on the Straw Hats carrying its anime slate well into the years ahead. With the trailer now out in the world, the real question is whether that February debut will reward the three-year wait, so tell us in the comments whether the footage has you hoisting the Jolly Roger or pumping the brakes on your excitement.
