A quick teaser to whet fans’ appetites for Season 2.

When Netflix first announced that they were going to make a live-action adaptation of One Piece, a lot of skeptics’ concerns were centered around the visual style of the source material. Even among the many highly stylized anime/manga franchises that began in the ‘90s, One Piece has an especially unique aesthetic, one that creator Eiichiro Oda purposely wanted to look “strange,” and there was a risk that things like Luffy’s stretchy limbs or Zoro’s fighting with a sword in his mouth were going to look ridiculous in live-action.

The positive reaction to the first season of Netflix’s One Piece, though, shows that audiences by and large are happy with how those aspects turned out, so much so that a Season 2 is on the way. That doesn’t mean the seafaring adaptation is out of the woods just yet in terms of visual effects, though, because the upcoming season is going to bring with it perhaps the greatest challenge of all time with the arrival of Tony Tony Chopper. Chopper, in addition to being the Straw Hat Pirates’ doctor, is also a 90-centimeter (35-inch) tall talking anthropomorphized reindeer.

In addition to being a fan favorite, Chopper is a key contributing member in the Straw Hat Pirates’ adventures, with his stature and reindeer-ness both integral parts of the character. So while he’s definitely not someone who’s easy to drop into a live-action world, he’s also someone you can’t cut out of the story or just turn into a regular human, but Netflix is now ready to give us our first, very quick glimpse at its version of Chopper.

“Showing you three seconds of the Hollywood live-action Chopper!!” says the hand-written message from Oda as the video, posted by the official One Piece Twitter account starts. “Oh my God! This…is crazy,” says a voice that the subtitles attribute to Luffy, but from the genuine-sounding excitement, it could just as easily be the reaction of lead actor Inaki Godoy to seeing Netflix’s Chopper for the first time.

Sadly, the video doesn’t reveal Chopper’s face, and it’s hard to tell if the character is CG, practical effects, or some mix of the two. The setting, showing Chopper seated at a table with microphones and bottled water with the Netflix One Piece logo on a wall-mounted monitor, also suggests that this isn’t a clip from an actual episode, but rather a teaser video specifically made to tease Chopper’s introduction to the cast. Still, it looks like too much environmental trouble to go for for only three seconds, so hopefully there’s a full reveal coming soon, but in the meantime we’ve at least got a look at some other new faces coming to Netflix’s One Piece in Season 2.

Source, top image: Twitter/@Eiichiro_Staff
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