One Piece Director Hypes Luffy Voice Actor’s Gear 5 Performance

One Piece’s anime will be crossing over into a new era very soon as Monkey D. Luffy will be unleashing his highly anticipated Gear 5 transformation with the next episode of the series, and the director behind the One Piece anime is hyping up the performance from Luffy’s voice actor Mayumi Tanaka for the occasion! One Piece‘s anime will be reaching the true climax of the Wano Country arc with its next episode as following his latest loss to Kaido on the roof of Onigashima’s Skull Dome, Luffy will be unlocking a powerful new transformation from within himself. 

One Piece Episode 1071 of the anime will officially be bringing Gear 5 Luffy to the anime in full, and during One Piece Day 2023 earlier this Summer, the director behind the One Piece anime hyped up the upcoming transformation with a look behind the scenes at the team making it happen. In the special clip released during the event, One Piece director Tatsuya Nagamine hyped up the kind of performance fans can hope to see from the voice behind Luffy, Mayumi Tanaka, for the world breaking transformation. 

One Piece: Gear 5 Luffy’s Voice Performance Hyped

“There is this part about ‘Liberation,’ and it’s kind of like breaking free from the laws and physics of the world. So, our goal is to push boundaries with groundbreaking voice acting,” Nagamine began when opening up about how different Gear 5 Luffy is going to be from every other transformation seen thus far. Nagamine even went on to reveal that he tried to cut down on the laughing seen in Eiichiro Oda’s original version of Gear 5 Luffy seen in the pages of the manga, but Tanaka exceeded their expectations. 

“I thought it would be difficult to do the laughing parts, so I tried to cut down on the laughter a little,” Nagamine revealed.” But Ms. Mayumi Tanaka went above and beyond and gave us an amazing Gear 5 laugh. And the final result exceeded out expectations.” As for the work that went into bringing Gear 5 Luffy to life, Nagamine explained how the staff’s plans for the transformation grew bigger than ever expected, “We tried to do it just like in the manga…But, our dream started to broaden. The animators were all very enthusiastic about it. I’m really thankful about it.”

What are you hoping to see from Gear 5 Luffy’s debut in the One Piece manga? Let us know all of your thoughts about it in the comments! You can even reach out to me directly about all things animation and other cool stuff @Valdezology on Twitter!