‘One Piece’ review: A popular manga becomes a lively, nonsensical series

Turning comics and cartoons into live-action movies and television, as the Blue Fairy transformed the puppet Pinocchio into a real boy, remains a popular industrial strategy in a world where proven intellectual property rules the roost. It’s not always successful, and, one might add, nothing new — the first movie of “Alice in Wonderland” dates to 1903 — but it’s where we live now and for the foreseeable future. Which brings us to “One Piece,” premiering Thursday on Netflix, based on what is reportedly the world’s bestselling manga and the anime that followed it quickly into life. I assume some hopeful long-term plan has been filed — some money has been spent putting it together unlike, say, the streamer’s canceled-after-a-season “Cowboy Bebop” — but apart from the impossibility of ever catching up with a series with a quarter-century head start whose conclusion has yet to be written, the current economics of television suggest that only a small fraction of this saga will ever be filmed. Luffy’s definition of piracy, which is not really shared by any of the series’ other pirates — though some are nicer than others — has nothing to do with actual piracy: “Being a pirate isn’t about raiding villages or perfect plans, it’s about adventure.