One Piece Fans and Animators Give Their Piece on the Sanji-Toei Debate
The Sanji anime portrayal debate has reached its boiling point as even the One Piece anime staff are aware of this.
Released on April 6, 2025, Episode 1124 of the One Piece anime re-ignited a recent debacle regarding Sanji’s depiction in the anime.
First, the scene of York being held hostage by the Straw Hats notably does not feature Sanji in the crowd shot.
This could be an error and seems quite minor to note.
Second and, more egregiously for some fans, Sanji was shown to have “heart eyes” when providing Jewelry Bonney with food.
To note, these heart eyes were not present in the original manga and were not the first instance of a pattern fans of the character pointed out.
The reason for this concern is due to Jewelry Bonney’s actual age, that being of a 12 year old girl hidden in the body of a 22 year old adult woman thanks to the powers of the Toshi Toshi no Mi (Age Age Fruit).
This also continues the apparent “tradition” of the anime over-emphasizing Sanji’s perverted tendencies towards women, such as in one episode where he seemingly acted like a dog before Stussy.
This led to a flood of negative comments on the Twitter profile of the episode director, Aimi Yamauchi, directing their anger towards one episode director over many episodes of the recent arc that he had no involvement with.
However, the debate also brought back older concerns, such as how Sanji is “unfairly” depicted in terms of action scenes in the recent anime episodes.
An example of this was during the One Piece: Fan Letter during the added scene of the powerscaling debate involving Zoro being compared to other swordsmen and figures, such as Mihawk, Shanks, and Whitebeard.
The fact Zoro seems to be the center of attention while Sanji has no dedicated segment in Fan Letter has garnered much attention from fans.
More notably, there are some who have taken to Twitter to comment on the profile of Fan Letter director Megumi Ishitani, who responded to comments, saying:
“Sanji and Zoro are treated differently depending on whether or not there are passionate fans present. If they were to be treated equally, we would have to add more characters, more dialogue, and the story would get messy. Do you understand that?”
Ishitani even commented on the users taking her response out of context, saying:
“Stop maliciously taking things out of context. This was a response to a question about the ‘Fan Letter’ script. It features a Zoro fan character and A Sanji fan character exists in the original story too, but couldn’t appear due to the script’s Baratie setting and production constraints.”
To note, Ishitani reinterpreted a different part of the Straw Hat Stories spinoff novel that Fan Letter adapts, which took place after the Dressrosa Arc where the Dressrosa soldiers witnessed Zoro cut down Pica in his stone giant form.
Source: Twitter
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