Highlights
- Showrunner Stephen Maeda reveals the challenge of bringing live-action One Piece to life, including budget constraints and the need to limit VFX.
- The series remained faithful to the manga, but had to make changes and had to tear down intricately designed sets after only a few scenes.
- Despite the challenges, the live-action One Piece series on Netflix has been a huge success, with season 2 officially ordered.
After the success of the One Piece live-action series on Netflix, one of the series’ showrunners has revealed one unsurprising challenge of bringing the popular series to live-action with such a large degree of faithfulness to the source material.
While Netflix has tried several live-action anime adaptations to varying responses, the live-action One Piece series has been the most successful. Based on the popular manga written by veteran Eiichiro Oda and published in the internationally acclaimed Weekly Shounen Jump, the One Piece manga is a long-running story that follows Straw Hat Luffy and his crew as they journey across the world in search of the titular One Piece, a treasure fabled to be of such magnitude that it can make any wish reality, including Luffy’s goal to be recognized as King of the Pirates.
RELATED: GR Interview: One Piece Cinematographer Nicole Hirsch Whitaker Talks About Shooting The Live Action Series
In an interview with The Wrap, the series co-showrunner Stephen Maeda revealed one major challenge that faced the crew working to bring the pirate adventure to life. Lamenting the budget constraints of the series, which exceeded expectations and set the stage for a new One Piece video game, the showrunner gave a case study. “Our VFX producer and supervisor were on set every single day telling us stuff like, ‘You can’t look this way. You’re going to be seeing the ocean in every single shot, and the cost of that ocean replacement for the tank is going to be too onerous.’ So we can look that way 25% of the time, but the rest has to be looking back towards ships and other surfaces that we won’t have to extend with VFX,” Maeda said. “So it was a huge, huge collaboration.
“It really is insanity as a television series in a lot of ways because you could theoretically spend an entire season or an entire series at Baratie, for example,” Maeda said of the series, which original One Piece creator Oda praised fittingly. “It was such a big, wonderful set. Only using it for two episodes and a couple of scenes and then having to tear it down was a heartbreaker, for sure.” While the show made some changes to the source material when adapting it, including one One Piece change that Meada considers his favorite, it remained largely faithful to the manga, leading to the issue of intricately designed sets being over and done with after a few scenes.
With One Piece season 2 officially ordered on Netflix, Maeda and his crew will have to keep at it for at least one more season. While Netflix doesn’t give out renewals easily, One Piece earned this one.
One Piece season 1 is available on Netflix.
Source: The Wrap