Netflix knew it had to change One Piece’s world for live action
When you first read Eiichiro Oda’s wonderful manga One Piece, one of the things that sticks out initially is that it’s a visual gold mine — not just in its fantastical locales and outlandish character designs, but in how it relays information to the reader. So much happens at once, whether it’s action or character relationships or steady, constant world-building that in less skilled hands would easily devolve into a cacophony of imagery. So then, when you hear that it’s being adapted into a live-action series, your first question is likely: “Ummm… how?”
Luckily, with oversight from Oda himself, the crew behind Netflix’s new live-action One Piece took on translating One Piece’s world from the page to the screen with aplomb. Involved in this tricky adjustment from one medium to another were production designer Richard Bridgland and editor Tessa Verfuss. Both were tasked with figuring out the inherent logical steps that it would take to recreate Oda’s world and also deliver the kind of aesthetic assuredness that has kept fans attached to the series for over 25 years.
Verfuss was not stranger to shows involving pirates — she’d served as an editor on Black Sails, but when she watched a few episodes of the One Piece anime and was infected by the enthusiasm of co-showrunner Matt Owens, she saw a project that she couldn’t pass up: “It’s gotta be huge and it’s got this massive fan base. Who wouldn’t want to work on something like this?” Bridgland, on the other hand, got a crash course in One Piece enthusiasm from another source: “I wasn’t familiar with the manga when I started, but I asked my kids about them and they were like, ‘Oh my god! One Piece? That’s huge!’ So I started looking into it and what I saw was the most
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