The production designer of Netflix’s One Piece live-action series, Richard Bridgland, explains the reason behind the show making changes to Windmill Village. One Piece was released to a bunch of positive reviews from critics and has managed to snatch the top spot on Netflix’s popularity charts, beating both Stranger Things season 4 and Wednesday. The story follows the Straw Hat crew searching for a valuable treasure that could make protagonist Monkey D. Luffy the King of the Pirates.
The live-action adaptation does differ in details from the manga and the anime, such as the Windmill Village, which has undergone some changes in the Netflix show. During an interview with Polygon, Richard Bridgland explained the reason behind the relocation of Luffy’s hometown from the sea’s coastline itself. He said, "When we're designing Windmill Village I thought that Luffy, if he wanted to become a pirate, [he's] got to have some connection to the sea and be able to meet pirates."
Bridgland further added that he had the same thing in mind for the manga’s other locations, such as Chef Zeff’s floating restaurant, Baratie, and Kaya’s mansion. Even though some One Piece fans won’t accept the changes Bridgland and the entire show’s crew applied to the manga, filmmaker Emma Sullivan recently explained that a literal adaptation wouldn’t have been good.
Sullivan claimed that attempting to recreate the heightened features of Netflix’s One Piece would have turned the entire viewing experience into a “really awkward” one. She stated, "I think what we had to do is we had to find a grounded approach, and we had to find an emotionally real approach to it. We have to kind of tap into these characters, and feel what makes us relate as an audience to them."
Netflix’s One Piece sas influenced by The Witcher
Aside from the manga, the One Piece live-action adaptation was also influenced by other things. The show’s producer, Marc Jobst, took some ideas from his experiences working on two Netflix productions, The Witcher and Daredevil when he decided to go ahead and produce the first two episodes of One Piece Season 1. Jobst explained how working on Daredevil, he learned that an action scene must "tell some kind of character story, or some kind of storyline, so that, at the end of the action sequence, we're somewhere different to where we began."
However, on The Witcher set, he learned how to capture fight choreography effectively on camera. Not only this, but the One Piece crew also had to listen to the suggestions put forth during development by Eiichiro Oda, the creator of the manga. One Piece has gained a lot of popularity ever since it was released, and from what we can see, it’s totally deserved!
One Piece Season 1 is currently available to stream on Netflix.
