‘One Piece’ Production Designer on the World-Building Question That Stumped Eiichiro Oda

There are some things you can only become aware of when the time comes to make it look as real as possible. When it comes to One Piece, both the anime and manga series benefited from the liberties that the pages and the 2-D animation provide. Now, with the world-famous franchise getting adapted to the live-action format, production designer Richard Bridgland revealed to Collider’s Mike Thomas he ended up having to ask manga creator Eiichiro Oda a question that the mangaka himself had never thought about.

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The question came up during pre-production, when Bridgland was working with cinematographer Nicole Whitaker in order to decide what the live-action series would look like. When it comes to lighting, an anime series can just “fabricate” its own light through the hands of artists, while black-and-white manga only makes a distinction between night and day. In live-action, this is not quite as simple, as Bridgland said:

“I remember one of the big things was about whether there was electricity in the world. It was really interesting because I needed to have electricity in the world for lighting because otherwise everything was gonna be candlelight and fire and everything, and it was gonna be so it could get very one note like that. And it was interesting because he came back, and he said, “That’s such a good question.” He’d never really thought of it in such a bold way.”

Wait, What About Cola Power?

Manga and anime fans know that One Piece’s world is quite anachronistic: It contains both modern and ancient elements, not to mention fantastic ones. So it was up to the franchise creator Eiichiro Oda to decide if electricity was a thing in Luffy’s world – which he didn’t need to think about throughout all these years that One Piece existed.

Bridgland revealed that he asked the mangaka if they could use a manga element called “cola power” as a substitute for electricity, but Oda decided to hold back on that by telling him: “Look, don’t use the cola power. That’s something that appears later in the story arc, but let’s say, yes, there’s electricity.” The production designer was impressed with the response because it showed Oda’s complete domain of his own world, and his understanding that cola power should not be introduced to the story as early as Episode 1.

So now we know that both electricity and cola power (at some point) coexist in the One Piece live-action world, and as Bridgland underscored, this is fundamental in order to make the series look better. You don’t need to think very hard to see with your mind’s eye that series and movies illuminated by candles and torchlights have a similar look, and the advantage of One Piece’s anachronistic setting is that it can have a unique look that has already been showcased at the trailers.

Netflix premieres One Piece this Thursday, August 31. You can watch the latest trailer below: