One Piece Film: Red Movie Review

Date: 2022 October 30 20:44

Posted by Joe

The new One Piece Film : Red hits cinema screens across the UK and Ireland from Friday 4th November 2022. We've seen it and can tell you all about this great shonen movie. So read our spoiler free review to find out more!

You can also visit onepiecefilm.red to find a screening near you.

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One Piece Film: Red is the latest cinematic outing in the One Piece franchise. It's a standalone story, with input from the original manga creator Eiichiro Oda who is billed as executive producer. He also provided new character designs for this movie.



Toei have been hyping this movie, by taking over the screens in Times Square in New York. It's being doing exceptionally well in the Japanese box being the number 1 for over six weeks. The film continues to break box office records, and has earned over ¥13.9 Billion (£85.5m) to become this year's highest grossing film in Japan.



One Piece is set in its own world where pirates rule the seas and the World Government and its navy are trying to stop the pirates at their games. The series follows the adventures of the Straw Hat Pirates. They are led by Luffy who is a pirate with amazing stretchy rubbery powers. His crew are all excellent fighters each with their own special skill and ability to bring to the fight.



As it's a long running manga series spanning over 1,000 episodes, it has a whole plethora of characters many of whom appear movie in one form or another. To people new to the franchise you'd expect to this to be overwhelming, but it's actually not. You won't always realise the significance of certain characters appearing, but it's perfectly possible to watch and enjoy this movie while not having watched 1,000+ episodes of the anime and the other 14 movies!



Normally Luffy and his crew are searching for the legendary One Piece treasure, but this time they go to a pop concert hosted by popular singer Uta. In this standalone story it's revealed that Uta is legendary pirate Shank's daughter, making her a target for kidnapping by other pirates! But all Luffy and crew want to do is enjoy the show.

High octane action follows with a good amount of shonen fighting (well it is One Piece). The pirates call out their moves while doing them, in classic shonen style.

It's animated to a consistent high standard. In certain pop performance scenes with Uta it switches to a 3D model, but that works well as if she's in performance mode.

There are lots of great comic relief moments to the action too. On another level with the addition of Uta the movie is also has a lot of musical set pieces from some great pop numbers to some other tunes that are darker!

With Uta being a special character for the movie, she doesn't fall into the trap that other stand alone anime films have with new movie characters feeling inserted for the movie and a bit jarring. Since she's been designed by Oda himself she feels a natural part of the One Piece world. Her back story and character development is also great!

You can tell they also had a bit of fun with the character design and costumes with the crew dressed up in rock gear for a few scenes.

While it's not ground breaking, One Piece Film: Red sets out and does exactly what it intends to do. It's exactly what you'd expect from a One Piece Movie and that's not a bad thing!

It's a highly enjoyable bit of fun!



One Piece Film : Red hits cinema screens across the UK and Ireland from Friday 4th November 2022. It's being released by Anime Limited and Toei in the UK.

Visit onepiecefilm.red to find a screening near you.