Toei Producer Shinji Shimizu has opened up about details for the upcoming One Piece Film: RED, including how this is the film that Oda has been the most involved with ever and whether it’s canon or not! Given this, I gathered all the important information from Shimizu’s interviews regarding the new movie below!

• Shimizu believes this is the movie Oda has been the most involved with, more than even Strong World, which was the one he was most involved with in the past, believing this will make RED a higher grade film. He mentions that Oda acts as executive producer, character designer, and script reviser.

• The movie will be a separate story from the main series continuity, but Shimizu suggests through Oda we might find out some things about Shanks and that we will get to know more about his secrets (suggesting that the movie’s events will seemingly be non-canon to the timeline, but canon information reveals may be featured). Shimizu says that for Oda the movies are just as important as the manga itself.

• Shimizu says he had pitched a Shanks movie to Oda several times in the past, but Oda was against it since he wanted to keep those plans to the manga. However, for the 25th anniversary, Oda finally accepted to make this movie, though he requested Luffy remained the main character and that a female character was featured.

• The poster girl for the movie might be related to Shanks in some way Shimizu says, which will be an important point for the movie. He suggests Shanks might appear in the movie directly too and might play an important role in it.

• He says that in previous films, the story was often centered around Luffy facing a powerful adversary that he would take down through intense combat. However, in this movie, “things will be a bit different”.

• Oda wanted a famous director for the movie that wasn’t from Toei and might not necessarily be familiar with One Piece. Shimizu proposed Goro Taniguchi to Oda’s team, as he had made the original first One Piece OVA despite not being part of Toei.

• Because One Piece is marching towards its end, there’s not many more movies they can make, so Oda got personally involved to create a unique product that will satisfy both fans of One Piece as well as those who haven’t seen the series before. They are hard at work to try and distribute the movie to as many countries as possible.

One Piece Film: RED will be releasing in Japanese theaters on August 6th 2022.

Sources:
http://mantan-web.jp/article/20220203dog00m200033000c.html
http://misiontokyo.com/noticias/bombazo-entrevista-exclusiva-al-staff-de-one-piece-film-red
https://ramenparados.com/resumen-de-la-entrevista-a-shinji-shimizu-productor-ejecutivo-de-one-piece/
https://cooljapan.es/entrevista-a-shinji-shimizu-productor-de-one-piece/

Personal note from me: it’s interesting to note that the poster girl, among all the races of Skyfolk we’ve seen in the series, appears to be distinctly Skypiean. Each Skyfolk has a different wing size and hers seem to be the size of Skypiean wings, but beyond that she also wears a traditional Skypiean dress and even has a hair-style very similar to those from Skypiea, suggesting she might hail from that island. How will her connection with Skypiea play out in Film RED? I can’t wait to find out!