The Straw Hat Pirates will get an updated look for One Piece Red.
The new costumes were revealed during the One Piece panel at Jump Festa, a yearly event put on by publisher Shueisha to promote the Shonen Jump manga magazine and all of the anime and manga franchises that it has published. While a new trailer or additional story details for the new movie were not revealed, the panel did showcase the first, rough sketches of the Straw Hat Pirates' new costumes. Some characters, like Luffy and Sanji, simply take on a more casual appearance, while other characters received more drastic redesigns, such as Usopp's KISS-inspired outfit and Franky's boxy new appearance, which looks to be inspired by the design of a classic cassette boombox. The new movie is still scheduled to premiere in Japan on Aug. 6. An international release has been confirmed but no date has been given yet.
One Piece: Red will be the 15th theatrical release in the franchise. Series creator Eiichiro Oda is supervising production of the new movie. Oda previously admitted the movie was born out of his desire to add a new female character to the series. "I am tired of drawing legendary old grandpas in movies! I want to draw a new little female character! That's the character I want to make now! And that's how it started," Oda said. The new movie is being written by Tsutomu Kuroiwa, who previously wrote the script for One Piece Film: Gold and will be directed by Code Geass' Goro Taniguchi.
Red-Haired Shanks, the captain of the Red Hair Pirates and one of the four emperors of the New World, will be the focus of the movie's story. Shanks is the man who inspired the series' protagonist, Monkey D. Luffy, to take on the life of a pirate, and he also gave the stretchy young hero his iconic straw hat. A previously released teaser trailer revealed that the new female character that Oda mentioned is a singer of some kind.
One Piece began its long journey in 1998. In the 24 years since the publication of its first chapter, the story of Luffy and his quest to locate the treasure known as One Piece has become the best-selling manga series in history, with almost half-a-billion copies in circulation around the world. In 2021 the manga published both its 1000th chapter and its 100th collected volume. The anime adaptation, which is produced by Toei Animation and originally debuted in 1999, recently aired its landmark 1000th episode. A live-action adaptation of the series is currently in the works from Netflix and Tomorrow Pictures, who produced the recently released and also recently cancelled live-action Cowboy Bebop.
Source: Jump Festa
