After years of relative silence, The One Piece, a full-fledged remake of One Piece, has finally dropped a teaser trailer ahead of its February 2027 release window. The teaser, of course, didn’t show off much, but in terms of visual spectacle and paying tribute to the original anime’s legacy, it looks like it will be more than a success, and there should be no doubt that The One Piece will be well worth the wait.
One of the biggest selling points of The One Piece has been the idea of it improving on the original anime by Toei Animation, and while that’s mostly been in regards to pacing and animation, that’s far from the whole story. Just from the teaser trailer, The One Piece will set out to fix many of the issues that have plagued the original anime for decades, and fortunately, that includes a major controversy that the anime has seemingly doubled down on in recent years.
One of the biggest controversies plaguing the One Piece anime has been One Piece's habit of whitewashing dark-skinned characters; not only would characters with dark skin in the manga have lighter skin in the anime, but characters depicted with dark skin in the pre-timeskip era would suddenly look white from the post-timeskip era onward. Granted, characters like Robin and Zoro were never supposed to have dark skin, but even Usopp, a canonically black character, has been getting progressively lighter over the years to the point that he looks white in recent arcs, and that’s as confusing as it is disgusting.
One Piece’s whitewashing controversy has only been getting worse over the years, but Netflix's The One Piece will finally fix it. Usopp briefly appeared in The One Piece’s teaser trailer, and he was depicted with a dark skin tone more akin to how he used to look in the anime; considering how common it had become for Usopp to be given light skin in official One Piece media, it wouldn’t have been strange for The One Piece to be the same, especially after Usopp’s terrible concept art was revealed, so it’s great that the reboot is avoiding that controversy altogether.
Whitewashing doesn’t appear to be an issue for The One Piece, and that only highlights how terrible it was that it even became a problem. A big part of One Piece’s charm has always been its themes of love and compassion transcending the superficial boundaries people set for themselves, and time and time again, it’s been clear that race has been part of that. The One Piece anime going out of its way to whitewash its people of color blatantly flies in the face of that idea, and it deserves all the criticism people have given it and more.
One Piece’s constant whitewashing is especially bad because Usopp, of all characters, isn’t immune to it. Having a black character as part of the main cast in an anime, especially one that started in the 90s, has always been a major selling point of the anime, as it showed that it was a story that always understood the importance of highlighting minorities in media. That was always a hallmark of One Piece’s story, so to see Usopp constantly be hit with whitewashing has been incredibly disappointing for fans old and new.
Toei Animation’s constant whitewashing of people of color in One Piece has been a consistently disgusting display of blatant racism, and while the main anime is unlikely to stop anytime soon, it’s great to see The One Piece going in the opposite direction and at least giving Usopp his proper skin tone. It’s unknown how far The One Piece will go with everything, but at the very least, it’s safe to say that one of the worst issues plaguing One Piece has finally been resolved.
