One Piece Film: Red Guide: Runtime, Cast and Where to Stream

Eleven hundred episodes, and the film that needs none of them

This is the One Piece film you can hand to someone who has never seen One Piece. Film: Red is a musical built around one new character, the singer Uta, and it introduces her, her relationship to Shanks and the reason any of it matters inside its first twenty minutes. The Straw Hats arrive as an ensemble the film is happy to explain. That is unusual for this franchise and it is the whole reason this page exists: the hardest question about One Piece is where a film slots into an anime past its eleven-hundredth episode, and the answer here is that it does not have to.

What it is not is canon. Film: Red sits outside the manga’s continuity – nothing in the ongoing series depends on it and nothing in it changes the series – so watching it out of order costs you nothing. Gōrō Taniguchi directed from a screenplay by Tsutomu Kuroiwa, Yasutaka Nakata is credited with the film’s music, and the singer Ado performs Uta’s vocals opposite Kaori Nazuka’s speaking voice – a split the production made deliberately, and the reason the cast list above carries two performers for one character. Toei Animation released it in Japan on August 6, 2022; Crunchyroll put it in US and Canadian theaters on November 4, 2022, the first One Piece film to go out under the Crunchyroll brand after Sony’s acquisition – the release record has the territory-by-territory dates.

At 115 minutes and rated PG-13 it is an evening, not a commitment, and Netflix carries it in English and in Japanese with subtitles. If it works and you want the series, the sensible next step is not episode 1 of eleven hundred and counting – it is our guide to the live-action One Piece, which covers the same opening stretch of the story in eight hours. For the rest of the current anime shelf, our Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle guide, our Jujutsu Kaisen guide and our My Hero Academia guide are the other big ones.