A new trailer for Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War has been released.
This year’s Anime Expo in Los Angeles saw the highly anticipated continuation of the classic shonen anime series. In addition to featuring all of the returning characters, the trailer focuses on Yhwach, the Quincy King who has been imprisoned for over 900 years and plays a significant role in the events of the Thousand-Year Blood War arc. The panel also confirmed that key members of the original English voice cast, including Johnny Young Bosch as main character Ichigo Kurosaki and Michelle Ruff as Rukia, will return to dub the new season. The trailer concludes by confirming the new season’s October premiere date once more.
The original Bleach anime ran from 2004 to 2012 and ended before it could fully adapt all of Tite Kubo’s shonen manga, which published its final chapter in 2016. The anime adaptation of the manga’s final arc, Thousand-Year Blood War, was first announced in 2000 and will be the first animated adaptation of the manga’s final arc. During the panel, Kubo stated once more that the new anime will include new scenes and story elements that he was unable to include in the original manga.
Tite Kubo’s Bleach debuted in 2001 and was regarded as one of Shonen Jump’s “Big Three” franchises of the time, along with Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto and Eiichiro Oda’s still-running One Piece. Ichigo’s story ended in 2016, but Kubo returned to its world in 2018 with Burn the Witch, a spinoff series set in England that explores the western branch of Soul Society. Kubo released a new chapter of the main Bleach series, “No Breaths from Hell,” in 2021. While the new chapter was initially promoted as a one-time, stand-alone release to commemorate the series’ 20th anniversary, fans were pleasantly surprised to learn that it was actually a prologue for a new adventure starring Ichigo and the rest of the Soul Reapers. However, both Kubo and Shonen Jump publisher Shueisha has been tight-lipped about the possibility of additional chapters or a full sequel series since its release.
Both the original Bleach and its spinoff series are available in English from VIZ Media. It is available for streaming on a variety of platforms, including Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, and plenty of other websites (if you know what I mean).
