Endless fillers or incredibly slow pace? Both sound like a bad idea, but there’s actually a reason for them.
Summary:
- The Big Three had to remain behind their manga, and the studios behind them chose different approaches.
- Naruto and Bleach (by Pierrot) have many filler episodes, while One Piece (by Toei) often stretches the content out.
- Both formats have their strengths and weaknesses — and in the end, neither one is better.
Among the fans of the Big Three, there have always been arguments about which series is the better one. There is little sense in dissecting all the arguments, as many of them boil down to personal preferences of fans. However, some of the points are worth discussing. One of the most interesting points of comparison is between Naruto/Bleach and One Piece. All three anime are almost incomprehensibly long — but the reason why One Piece is so long is different from the other two (and we’re not talking about the length of the source material here).
How to not catch up to the manga?
Yes, the manga for all three ran for hundreds of chapters. That, however, created a conundrum: the anime was going to catch up with the manga at some point unless something was done to delay it. The ways that studios Pierrot (Naruto, Bleach) and Toei (One Piece) went about that were very different — and both, in the opinions of fans, hurt the series, albeit in different ways.
Naruto and Bleach
Naruto’s method (which the later released Bleach anime also followed) was quite simple — the series had a lot of so-called “filler episodes” that do not adapt content from the manga. That allowed the anime to keep a considerable distance from the manga, but the series ran into another problem.
Fans were not very happy to watch fillers, often complaining about them being pointless, not impacting the story at all, and being of dubiously canonical status. The most egregious examples in Naruto were the “filler wasteland” of almost a hundred episodes near the original series, and the random fillers during the high-tension arcs of late Shippuden.
One Piece
What One Piece is doing is radically different. While the anime barely has any filler episodes, it keeps behind its manga in a different way. Especially in the mid-late arcs of One Piece, the pace of the anime slows down considerably, often coming to one chapter per episode — which is very slow for an action series.
The extended recap sections at the start of many episodes also don’t help, and this led to the creation of a fan edit called One Pace — which removes the recap content and shortens the egregiously slowed down episodes. Many fans argued against it, however, as that’s not how the anime was intended to be watched.
So which is better?
In the end, neither format is actually better than the other. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, and for both, there are many fans and haters. Perhaps the actual solution was offered years later with My Hero Academia, however, which is releasing 25-episode seasons with breaks between them — and fans seem very happy about it. Granted, this probably would not have worked back when the Big Three were releasing.