Netflix’s One Piece Reveals the Secret Behind Luffy’s Devil Fruit Scenes

Netflix’s One Piece is a hit. Taking a major chance in bringing the shonen franchise to life, the showrunners responsible for Luffy and his Straw Hat Pirates on the streaming service are already working on the second season. Recently, we here at Comicbook.com had the opportunity to chat with showrunner Steve Madea about a number of topics that were related to the Grand Line. One of the biggest topics that Madea covered was Luffy’s Devil Fruit abilities and how the series brought them to life.

Madea started the conversation on Luffy’s powers by stressing the amount of thought that went into translating his stretching abilities to the live-action format, “There was so much thought and conversation that went into how to do the devil fruits and how do visual effects for the show period. And the first idea was let’s keep everything as grounded as possible. Let’s really wear everything down, make it look like it’s been at sea for 15 years, and make sure that everything feels real as opposed to just bright and shiny and that costumes don’t feel like cosplay. The second thing though, about the devil fruits to answer your question was we watched a lot of stretchy movies, TV shows to see the effect on pretty well, but there were some choices that were made in some of the shows that we thought wouldn’t work for us and helped with or harmed the idea that this was actually stretchy power. One of the things we did was make some ground rules for ourselves as far as the stretchy powers were concerned.”

Gum Gum Live Action

Madea then extrapolated on addressing Monkey D. Luffy’s super powers and what the best method was to make them not “look fake” in the series, “On Luffy’s stretching, we knew we had the ability to make it top of the line special effects, but how do we make it not look fake? Because that effect just looks fake sometimes, even when it’s really well done. And so part of the process of that was I fought for this very hard, which is when we see stretchy power, number one, it’s fast. It doesn’t linger in the stretch as much as possible. There may be one or two shots in the show where you actually have an opportunity to study it. If you want to free frame it, you can, but rubber power is fast. It snaps like a rubber band and it moves quick out, quick in. And then the other thing was we really made an effort not to shoot rubber power across the screen or vertical on the screen. It all had to be coming towards you or moving away from you, and I think that helped making it feel a little more kinetic.”

Luffy’s powers will only get stronger and wilder as the live-action series progresses. While nothing has been discussed so far, if Monkey ever hits his “Gear” transformations, then the showrunners and virtual effects departments will have some serious work on their hands.