One Piece, Digimon Anime End Month-Long Hiatus Due to Hacking Incident

The One Piece and Digmon: Ghost Game anime have announced their return dates.

The official Twitter account for the One Piece confirmed that Episode 1014, entitled "Marco's Tears! The Bond of the Whitebeard Pirates," will air on April 17, followed by the release of Episode 1015, "Straw Hat Luffy - The Man Who Will Become the Pirate King" on April 24. Similarly, the official Twitter account for Digmon: Ghost Game confirmed that the series will also resume broadcasting new episodes on April 17 as well. The new releases will be the first episodes of each series to air since Toei Animation was affected by a hacking incident on March 6, in which an unauthorized third party accessed the company's private network and caused a shutdown of the studio's systems, resulting in several productions being hit with indefinite delays.

While it appears Toei Animation has mostly recovered from the hack, there is one very notable absence among the return announcements: Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero. The film was originally scheduled to be released on April 22 in Japan, with a North American premiere to follow sometime this summer. Goku and friends' latest theatrical outing was indefinitely delayed following the incident, and a new release date for the highly anticipated movie has yet to be announced.

Production on Toei Animation's other big anime movie, One Piece Film: Red, appears to be going smoothly, as the studio has been releasing a steady stream of new information and art from the film in recent weeks. Most recently, the studio revealed full-color art for Luffy, Nami and Zoro's new costumes. The movie sees the Straw Hat Pirates traveling to a new island for a music festival for a new adventure that will focus on Red-Haired Shanks, the pirate captain who inspired Luffy to follow in his footsteps, and a new, as-yet unnamed female character, who appears to be a singer of some kind. The movie will be released in Japan on Aug. 6. Details about the film's international release have yet to be announced.

Toei Animation was originally founded in 1948 and is one of Japan's oldest and most well-known animation companies. The studio has worked on some of the most iconic anime series of all time, including Mazinger Z, Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, Sailor Moon and Yu-Gi-Oh. Despite working on some of the biggest anime series in history, the studio has had a strained relationship with fans in recent years, and has been criticized for its heavy-handed approach to protecting its copyrights online. In 2021, the company kicked off a controversy about fair use policies when it used copyright strikes to remove hundreds of reviews of its shows off of YouTube. The incident caused YouTube to implement new policies to protect reviewers.

Source: Twitter (1, 2)

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