How Eyeline Helped Bring the Creatures of ‘ONE PIECE’ Season 2 to Life

For Season 2 of our hit action-adventure series ONE PIECE, we brought a new crew of pirates along for the ride — our partners over at Eyeline.

The VFX facility, which has been part of the Netflix family since 2021 and merged with Scanline last year, has worked on many of our most popular series and films like Stranger Things, Happy Gilmore 2, Wednesday and Don’t Look Up. However, working on the latest voyages of the young pirate Monkey D. Luffy and his gang of straw hats presented its own unique set of circumstances.

“ONE PIECE is a really interesting show because, albeit a live-action show, it’s very much in a fanciful world,” says VFX supervisor Derek Spears. “There’s definitely a style to it all.”

The Eyeline team was entrusted with creating three specific larger-than-life creatures: the Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex Monkey D. Luffy and Miss Wednesday encounter in Episode 4 and the goldfish (aka “The Island Eater”) the Going Merry must attack in Episode 5.

“We really were very worried about how to sell the goldfish,” Spears says. Even the show’s creative team had concerns that this sequence may not be believable. So the team used hyper-realistic textures on the fish and crafted high-resolution, slow-water stimulations around it to make the normally small, non-threatening creature feel huge and menacing. “All of this is really, really slow and subtle because we want it to feel large,” Spears adds. “And slow is big.”

While the goldfish may have proved to be a large feat, the VFX team had a lot more fun creating the dinosaurs. The Tyrannosaurus rex was originally only slated for a few shots, but manga creator and series executive producer Eiichiro Oda liked the final result so much that he asked for more once he saw renderings of the creature. 

And the Brontosaurus was “easily” one of the most fun characters to design, according to Spears. “We looked a lot at what filmmakers had done in the first season,” he says. “They have a very particular look to a lot of their creatures, so we took that as inspiration.”

After receiving feedback from ONE PIECE’s creative team to make the brontosaurus more human-feeling, Spears and his team went all in, adding a puppy dog-like snout, human molars and even eyelashes. “All of these were just way outside the realm of a normal brontosaurus, but in their world, it completely works,” he says. “It just adds that little bit of extra something that takes it out of the normal world and puts it in the ONE PIECE world.”

In addition to these efforts out of the Vancouver office, Eyeline’s Seoul team worked on various elements of the CG wax from Mr. 3's fingers and candelabra sequence, as did the India office, which recently moved from Mumbai to Hyderabad.

Thanks in no small part to its eye-catching visuals, ONE PIECE Season 2 has spent two weeks atop the Global Top 10 English TV list, grabbing 27.9M views.

Eyeline’s work on ONE PIECE Season 2 across offices, episodes and creatures is just another example of its ability to blend scale, realism, and personality for our members around the world.

Seasons 1 and 2 of ONE PIECE are now streaming — only on Netflix.