How Netflix’s One Piece brought Luffy’s Gum Gum powers to live action

A live-action anime adaptation is always precarious.

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. Luffy, who ate a Gum-Gum Fruit as a child out of sheer hunger, was cursed to be able to contort and stretch his body in an unnatural way. This came at the price of being vulnerable to 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 PieceLive-action TV is a medium that has a lot of appeal.

Casey Crafford/Netflix

“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. “He doesn’t just have the ability to do stuff without some sort of movement and inertia that drives the movement of his body parts.

“We did go through lots of stages, just in terms of the development of the look, because the original thought was: We didn’t want him to feel too much like the other stretchy superheroes out there. And we wanted to keep it fast.”

Witnessing Luffy’s elasticized fighting abilities in the live-action series is a real treat, and easily one of the most impressive visual effects feats of the entire show. Whether it’s sweeping his leg like a gigantic pole to knock a cadre of marines off their feet or being pulled in several different directions like a Stretch Armstrong while being tortured by Buggy the Clown, seeing Luffy’s Gum Gum abilities brought to life is always a delight, never veering too far either into grotesque body-horror or uncanny unbelievability.

The scene of Luffy using his signature “Gum Gum Pistol,” a Looney Tunes-esque exaggeration of a sucker punch, to knock the villainous pirate captain Alvida off her boat in the series’ first episode proved to be the benchmark by which all subsequent scenes of Luffy’s powers in action were measured against. The look of this sequence took over a year.

“It went through [showrunners] Steven Maeda and Matt Owens, all the way up to Netflix and Mr. Oda himself,” Ramsey told Polygon. “It just took a long time to get that development look right.”

Part of getting that look right was deciding how much of Luffy’s musculature anatomy to emphasize in the texture and surface of his body while he uses his powers. “We looked at a lot of different things,” Scalise says. “Like: What’s the surface tension on his skin? Were we looking for muscles? Or, perhaps, the belly button as his body transforms? When do you stop being anatomically accurate? You can go all cartoony with it. All the Luffy content is grounded so that, even if these physics were real, it would look something like this. [Gum Gum powers] would really do.”

Image: Netflix

But one of the most pivotal elements in depicting Luffy’s live-action Gum Gum powers was the physical performance of Iñaki Godoy, who portrays the Straw Hat Pirate Captain in Netflix’s series. “He’s a total pro,” Ramsey speaks about working with Godoy. “He’s only 18 years old, but he acts like he’s 35. And probably one of the nicest guys you’re going to work with.”

Godoy’s performance as Luffy perfectly captures the youthful delight and undaunted determination of a young teenager leaping feet first into the dangerous and exotic world of piracy in pursuit of his lifelong dream. Netflix’s One Piece adaptation has overcome a lot of challenges in its journey to television screens, not the least of which was finding the right actor to bring Luffy’s rubbery antics to life. But like Luffy puffing up to volley a cannonball, Netflix’s One PieceThe team had to rise up for the occasion. It made the whole thing look cool and weird.