‘One Piece’ Production Designer Shares Which Set Is His Favorite

Even in the One Piece manga and anime, the floating restaurant and ship Baratie is a wonder to look at. Not surprisingly, this is one of the set pieces fans are most excited to see in live-action format. With a huge fish figurehead and a several-story restaurant on top of the fish’s body, the Baratie is also one of production designer Richard Bridgland’s favorite sets, as he revealed to Collider’s Mike Thomas in an interview.

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Bridgland also told Thomas that he’s “most affectionate” of the Baratie sets because “it’s such a unique-looking restaurant, but a unique-looking ship, and every detail in it had its own logic.” Bridgland went on to call the Baratie a “striking image” and revealed an important change made to the ship, as well as why the team decided to do it:

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“It had the fish head on the front, and originally we were going to put the dorsal bar inside the ship, and I designed this set that would have been really beautiful, but it was very sort of samey, it was another interior set. We were thinking about how we could show more of the ship because we liked it so much, so I came up with the idea of putting the bar inside the fish’s mouth. Having had a few drinks at the dorsal bar myself, I think it is actually probably the best bar I’ve ever been to in the world.”

‘One Piece’ Sets and Pirate Ships: As Realistic As Possible

Another important thing that Bridgland lowkey hinted at in the interview is a testament to the commitment of the production team in One Piece – the Baratie and probably all other set pieces in the series were fully functional, which is extremely important to make a fantasy setting look and feel authentic and like it could exist somewhere.

As the trailers have already showcased, One Piece will be a production design wonder at the very least, and some fans even had the chance of checking out the life-sized Going Merry on Netflix events across the world. Now we just have to keep our fingers crossed that the adaptation lives up to the manga and anime’s legacy – which it could very well achieve, since franchise creator Eiichiro Oda actively participated in the live-action series production.

The cast of One Piece features Iñaki Godoy (The Imperfects) as Luffy, Emily Rudd (Hunters) as Nami, Mackenyu (Knights of the Zodiac) as Zoro, Jacob Romero (Greenleaf) as Usopp, Taz Skylar (The Lazarus Project) as Sanji and Peter Gadiot (Yellowjackets) as Shanks.

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