One Piece Film Red Trailer Reveals the Return of Shanks

With the arrival of the series’ 1000th episode, One Piece revealed that a new feature length film was in the works, titled One Piece Red. Now, Toei Animation has released a teaser trailer for the upcoming film giving fans a glimpse at the character of Shanks.

Posted on the official Toei Animation YouTube channel, the 40-second trailer depicts a blank page of sheet music with one of the lines coming off the page. As it flies through space a sketch drawing of an unknown female character with a voice over that translates to “will her voice bring forth eternal happiness… Or endless imprisonment?” The trailer ends with another sketch, though this one being of a character that fans have been clamoring to see more of: Shanks. A fan favorite character with huge significance to the long running story, Shanks is the leader of the Red Hair Pirates and is also one of the Four Emperors of the Sea. Possibly most importantly, Shanks was the one that gave Luffy his lucky Straw Hat from which his crew is named after.

It has been over three years since Shanks appeared in the manga as the last issue he was seen in was Chapter 907, “The Empty Throne” back in June of 2018. As for the anime, that chapter was adapted in Episode 887 “An Explosive Situation – Two Emperors Going After Luffy” which originally aired in June of 2019. At the time of writing the manga is now at issue 1033 and the anime has reached its 1001th episode. With such a large gap since seeing the highly influential character, this new film will give fans a long awaited return of Shanks.

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One Piece started life as a manga in 1997 by Eiichiro Oda, who will act as producer on the upcoming film. The long-running and iconic series follows Monkey D. Luffy and his Straw Hat crew on their globe-trotting quest to find the “One Piece,” the legendary treasure of the former King of the Pirates, Gol D. Roger. The anime adaptation of the series debuted in 1999 and recently surpassed the milestone of its 1000th episode. Along with Oda as a producer, the director of Code Geass series Goro Taniguchi set to direct the feature film. This is a fitting choice of director as Taniguchi was also the director behind the 1998 OVA One Piece: Defeat The Pirate Ganzack, which predates the anime itself and, according to Oda, makes Taniguchi the first person in the world to have animated Luffy.

One Piece Red is set to release in Japan on August 6, 2022 with the worldwide release date to be announced at a later date. You can watch the brand new teaser trailer for the upcoming film down below.