Portraying, in real shooting conditions, anime and manga is not an easy task. This is particularly true in the case of fantastic shōnen, these action and adventure stories that are originally intended for a male teenage audience, such as One Piece by Eiichiro Oda [translated into French by Glénat].
Since these mangas take place in enchanting and extravagant settings, it is complicated (and costly) to faithfully reproduce these immense universes, with their colorful characters and unique creatures, not to mention that the production faces another, albeit more modest, yet equally important challenge: correctly representing the characters’ hair.
Hair often poses a problem during live-action adaptations of anime. As most Japanese mangas are in black and white, the quirky hairstyles and other marked graphic characteristics are used by the artists to differentiate their characters, as Jonathan Clements, the author of Anime. A History [unreleased in French], explains via email.
When a manga is then adapted into color animated drawings, a whole range of hair colors is often used so that they can be distinguished more easily.
