Netflix’s One Piece adaptation premieres this Thursday. VFX supervisors Scott Ramsey and Victor Scalise spoke to Polygon about the challenge of bringing Luffy’s elastic powers to life.
Creating a live-action adaptation of a beloved anime franchise is always a precarious position to be in.
Aside from the inherent narrative and tonal challenges that come with adapting a popular story from one medium to another, there’s also the question of how a live-action series should go about emulating the iconic cartoonish qualities intrinsic to animation. For Scott Ramsey and Victor Scalise, the visual effects supervisors on Netflix’s live-action series based on Eiichiro Oda’s adventure fantasy manga One Piece, that question presented itself in the form of the series protagonist Monkey D. Luffy and his elastic “Gum Gum” stretchy powers.
Luffy’s stretchy powers is as synonymous with One Piece as Goku’s Kamehameha ki blast is with Dragon Ball. After devouring a mysterious Gum-Gum Fruit in a youthful moment of absent-minded hunger, Luffy is cursed with the extraordinary ability to stretch and contort his body like rubber at the cost of life-threatening vulnerability to all forms of water. These powers have opened up a world of expressive possibilities in both Oda’s manga and its long-running anime adaptation, but presented a significant hurdle in bringing the world of One Piece to the medium of live-action television.
“It’s not like he can just like, think, and [his rubber powers] are going to throw out,” Scalise told Polygon about the process of conceptualizing Luffy’s powers on-screen.
