New York Comic-Con 2022

One Piece Film Red's Premiere

ANN's coverage of NYCC sponsored by Ize Press, the new Korean content imprint from Yen Press! From screen to print, K-Comics materialized!

It was an absolute honor and pleasure to attend my first red carpet screening event. One Piece Film Red is one of the highest rated and most financially successful animated films of the year, giving us another look into the ever-expanding world that the Straw Hat Crew find themselves in. But this time we're gonna go back a little bit before we move forward. The film focuses on fan-favorite Shanks and his daughter Uta, a singer who puts on the concert of a lifetime. Much like how Uta attempts to make everybody happy with her music, I feel like that's exactly what this premiere did.

People were interviewed both before and after the screening with staff really hoping to get an idea of what people were anticipating. There was plenty of complementary food and drinks as well as an open bar. Everyone had assigned seats and every seat came with its own trading card pack and a special Film Red T-shirt. All of that is the perfect setup for watching a major animated film on a giant IMAX screen in a room full of excited fans.

Overall, reaction to the film both during and after the screening were positive from what I saw. There were plenty of laughs at the exaggerated humor and everyone was bopping to the soundtrack with some people even clapping after certain performances from Uta. There were times when watching everything on a giant screen felt a little overly stimulating, especially when the sound mixing was so loud, but it was something that I got used to fairly quickly. There weren't exactly a lot of stand up and cheer moments throughout most of the film until we got towards the end. I think this film paid off some desires fans have wanted to see for awhile and one scene in particular made everyone lose it during the final climax. I won't give it away because it genuinely caught me by surprise as well, but let's just say that this film tries its best to reference everything.

After the screening, there was a 15 minute Q-and-A with director Goro Taniguchi and producers Shinji Shimizu and Hiroaki Shibata, who were all excited to meet fans in New York…even though the lights on them were so bright that they admitted they couldn't see us very well. They all answered a few questions regarding their experiences with the film, the direction it took, and the One Piece franchise as a whole. Considering that the One Piece project has been going on for about 25 years, there have been so many changes to the systems and production pipelines that it wouldn't be right to say that the show is being produced the same way as it was at the beginning. It's great that they could take a character from the beginning, like Shanks, and make him one of the focuses.

They explained that Eiichiro Oda is everything when it comes to One Piece. The choice to make this film about music was very much to appeal to Oda's love of music itself and they jokingly said that “maybe Oda would work harder than usual” if music was involved. However, this meant that the staff had to work that much harder as well since Oda was going through everything with a finetooth comb, especially the musical parts. My favorite part of this fun yet casual Q-and-A was at the end when Tanaguchi said Oda told him how One Piece ends but he promised that he wouldn't ruin that for us, to which the audience affectionately laughed. Afterwards, they all requested that the spotlights be turned down so that they could get a good look at us in the audience and thanked us all for being part of such a great experience.