One Piece: Why Zoro’s fighting style was difficult to adapt from manga
Netflix Roronoa Zoro, the infamous pirate hunter, was brought to life in Netflix‘s One Piece live-action series. While the show has gained immense praise, behind the scenes, the crew had some trouble adapting Zoro’s three-sword fighting style.
The original Japanese manga and anime portrayed Zoro as a tall and lean swordsman with bright green hair. He has an intense backstory training in Shimotsuki Village where he developed his iconic three-sword fighting style. The standout white sword belonged to his deceased friend from his childhood.
Zoro is known for holding the hilt of the white sword between his teeth in the manga and anime. All the while slicing and dicing with the other two. The visuals from the anime and manga are superb, but how did the One Piece team adapt it for the live-action?
One Piece’s showrunner broke down how he and his team found a middle ground for Zoro’s fighting style. It’s not necessarily easy to add in the missing links from the original manga drawing scenes.
One Piece’s Steven Maeda took on the challenge of Zoro’s unique sword skills
Even the One Piece showrunner became disheartened trying to figure out how to bring Zoro’s three-sword fighting style to the live-action.
Live-action adaptations don’t always happen smoothly. One Piece has become one of the rare few that has surpassed anyone’s imagination. Even die-hard fans of the original source material were surprised. One Piece director Marc Jobst knew the actors needed to be physically able to do stunts. For Zoro, the manga shows snippets of fight sequences with no clear indication of what happened in between.
According to Collider, Maeda explained: “The challenges in going from manga, from two-dimensional panels to three-dimensional live action, were huge. Not the least of which was kind of figuring out what goes between the panels that are drawn because a lot of times there’ll be a fight, for example, that ends with a really cool pose or move, but you haven’t seen what led up to that.”
The physical concept of how actor Mackenyu and the stunt double would portray the fighting style was another issue. “And how does Zoro fight with three swords in his mouth? What are the actual practical limitations of that? There are a lot of things to figure out to see, ‘How is this going to be able to transfer, and can we do this? Is it gonna look goofy? Is it something that we can pull off and have people go, ‘That’s cool! Maybe it’s not exactly how I pictured it, but that’s a really cool interpretation.’?’ So those are the things that I was really concerned with, is trying to make sure that everything translated across,” said Maeda.
It’s safe to say that the One Piece showrunner hit a home run. Zoro easily became a fan-favorite and it’s clear why he is a feared pirate hunter.
You can read more One Piece content here, the differences between the anime and series here, and more anime news here.