Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, the long-awaited anime adaptation of Tite Kubo’s blockbuster shonen manga, ends with the same heightened hallmarks that made Bleach a phenomenon in 2004. The Calamity, Pierrot Films’ fourth and final cour, delivers gorgeous animation, larger-than-life battles, and storytelling that can be as invigorating as it is convoluted. Bringing those qualities together, Thousand-Year Blood War‘s series finale feels suitably Bleach: frequently exhilarating, periodically exhausting, and a fitting conclusion to a landmark shonen series many fans never expected to live to see completed.
Bleach follows Ichigo Kurosaki (EN: Johnny Yong Bosch, JP: Masakazu Morita), a high schooler who moonlights as a substitute Soul Reaper, a samurai who defends humanity from demonic creatures called Hollows. In typical battle shonen fashion, this logline is only the tip of the series’ iceberg. Ichigo fights and befriends entire swaths of rival supernatural civilizations from heaven, hell, and everywhere in between, from the militant Soul Society and the seedy half-hollow society of Hueco Mundo to the long-thought-extinct archers, the Quincies, with humanity and his friends’ fate hanging in the balance.
Ichigo is the closest thing anime has to a messianic figure, tied to all the above parties as he fights tooth and nail to protect those he befriends along the way. The Calamity sees Ichigo and his allies contend with a war against the Quincies, led by the overpowered Yhwach (EN: Richard Epcar, JP: Sugo Takayuki), whose plans within plans in his aptly titled Thousand-Year Blood War would put Nostradamus to shame. All that said, Ichigo and friends have been on the back foot for damn near the entire anime, and its staggered release has only emphasized how long-ass the war is. All of which culminated in the final act of a war that’s rife with both the series’ highlights and lowlights.
Among the anime Big Three, Bleach was always my favorite growing up. Compared to Naruto and One Piece, Kubo’s supernatural battle shonen series was the coolest kid in class. Its art style was sleeker, moodier, and leagues more stylish, marrying streetwear aesthetics, striking silhouettes against an empty background, the BEST character theme songs, and cinematic action. You can hear a chorus of “aht aht aht”s from old-head anime fans whenever newer generations would swap Bleach out of the holy trinity of modern shonen for newer series inspired by its mid-2000s Toonami flow. That’s not how the Big Three worked. Bleach was an integral pillar of that triumvirate, helping usher anime into the mainstream. Just as folks grew up drawing Akira Toriyama’s Goku from Dragon Ball, I cribbed Kubo’s art style in my own art classes while marveling at his earlier, unfinished work, Zombie Powder,which I begged my mother to buy for me in grade school from Borders. It was that serious.
That same affection made Bleach‘s long, uncertain road toward a proper anime ending all the more frustrating. When the manga concluded in 2016, I was a twenty-year-old college sophomore, still in the throes of Naruto‘s conclusion from two years earlier. While I couldn’t recall the particulars of how the manga wrapped up, I distinctly remembered not exactly loving it. Even so, watching the anime fade from the zeitgeist in 2012, without adapting the manga’s final arc, felt like a sad way to see it go out, especially after all the filler seasons I watched along the way (shout out to the Bount arc). For roughly a decade, Bleach seemed destined to remain the unfinished member of the Big Three while Naruto spun off into Dragon Ball-style franchising with Boruto, One Piece marched endlessly forward, and a new generation of battle shonen emerged to redefine the genre.
Then came Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War. Announced in 2021 and stretched across four cours (parts), Studio Pierrot’s rebranded second studio, Pierrot Films, lived up to its motto, “make anime that wows,” by finally delivering the long-awaited adaptation fans had waited a decade for. Now a month away from my thirties, I revisited Bleach through Thousand-Year Blood War and remembered why I fell in love with the series in the first place. Like Saint Seiya and (more aptly) Yu Yu Hakusho before it, what begins as a monster-of-the-week spirit detective story gradually expands into a sprawling saga rife with long-buried conspiracies and enough political intrigue to make everyone’s alliances hard to keep straight. It also didn’t hurt that Kubo built a packed ensemble from all sides, fleshing them out as exhaustively as they explained how their increasingly esoteric powers worked. It’s no wonder the series inspired fellow mangaka Koyoharu Gotouge and Gege Akutami with Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen. In the same vein as My Hero Academia airing alongside One Piece, a series that inspired it after Kohei Horikoshi sent Eiichiro Oda touching fan mail before penning their own generation-defining epic, it was neat to watch Bleach air alongside its spiritual progeny as they near their respective ends.
No longer under the crunch of weekly television constraints, Pierrot Films’ resolute animation, helmed by creative forces Tomohisa Taguchi and Hikaru Murata, elevated Bleach to staggering heights of quality rivaling a feature anime film. From Shiro Sagisu’s booming orchestral original soundtrack to the imposing typeface on its episodic title cards, framed inside scenes at the perfect emotionally heightened moment, to the dazzlingly fluid animation and the poetic stanzas at the end of each episode, Bleach was cooking with gas in every respect.
That said, around episode eight of The Calamity, I quickly remembered why I kind of checked out of the manga’s finale. Funnily enough, Bleach and its progenitors share a trait: the same qualities that make them interesting also make them a bit exhausting to experience.
If there’s one thing that I have the biggest love-hate relationship with Bleach‘s manga over, it’s how often battles became elaborate games of escalation. Whereas DBZ would have characters charge up attacks for episodes on end, and Naruto and One Piece would get stuck in flashbacks and recaps, Bleach would have its characters spend countless pages confidently elucidating how their abilities made victory impossible for their adversaries. And they’d be doing dual monologues with the theatrical certainty of a Shakespearean actor while they’re in the middle of a fight. Then their opponents would unveil a previously hidden facet of their ability. The result felt less like a contest and more like kids on a playground with a verbose vocabulary and extensive knowledge of quantum physics saying “nuh-uh” to each other during a game of tag and explaining why they weren’t “it” because of a new rule they made up. As a page-turner, it was exciting at first. But as a weekly shonen, I had to put my hands up and say, “Whatever, man,” as the manga got more ridiculous and raced toward its finale.
While Thousand Year Blood War‘s staggered release offset the frustration of this trope by spacing out how repetitive it would become, The Calamity felt a lot like watching a New Japan Pro Wrestling Pay-Per-View in the weehours of the morning as a Westerner. Pierrot Film’s animation quality is ridiculous; Bleach‘s entire ensemble’s power-ups and finishing moves are rad as hell, and every near-fall defeat is electric. Like any five-star parameter-breaking bout, every Thousand-Year Blood War fight is packed with hope spots of Soul Reapers eking out a victory after a touching flashback, dramatic reversals as their foes reveal a new caveat to their powers, and hot tags to fan-favorite characters coming in at the nick of time to save the day.
But after a while, it gets exhausting to watch as both heroes and villains discover their second, third, fourth, and fifth winds within powers that already seem impossibly overpowered and conveniently specific. All the while, every fight cuts to a glazed-over stare, signaling a character’s sanctimonious end, knowing full well someone’s hand is moments from twitching and a pumped-out victorious chest is about to spray Kurosawa splatter from a sword piercing their ribcage, signaling a fifth round to begin moments before death was knocking on their door.
While I lobbied this same complaint towardInfinity Castle(with a specially pointed gripe about its incessant flashbacks breaking up fight momentum in a less complimentary way), I kind of loved how Pierrot Films handled things with The Calamity, at least upto a point. Bleach sits somewhere between rockstar cool and slam-poetry pretension. Characters explaining the crux of their powers leaned into their devil-may-care hubris in a way that was undeniably cool whenever they engaged in a verbal chess match, shoutcasting why they had the upper hand. And the anime, through its score and stellar directing and sequencing, only heightened how pinkies-up its battles felt compared to other shonen series. It’s what Bleach brought to the dance, only now the thread count on its robes is higher than it was as a weekly television show.
I loved new scenes the show offered under Kubo’s supervision, how connected its ensemble felt in eking out victories, and how characters who felt sidelined all got play in vital ways. Key among my favorite scenes is Orihime Inoue’s big moment, going from damsel in distress to a fully realized cleric-type figure who finally got to protect Ichigo. Though, ironically enough, around episode eight (roughly the same place I got a bit irritated with the manga), all of the above became a bit grating, knowing the show had to wrap itself up in two more episodes and things were looking astronomically FUBAR for Ichigo to beat a man who can halt any momentum by saying he stopped something before it happened.
Like plenty of shonen before it, Bleachis an imperfect story whose hallmarks can be as grating as they are invigorating. Thousand-Year Blood War doesn’t smooth over its problems with additional, original scenes supervised by Kubo; instead, it quadruples down on Bleach‘s increasingly convoluted approach to power systems and combat. Its saving grace is that it’s paired with some of the most gorgeous animation, compositing, and scoring Pierrot Films has ever produced. Even among the many battle shonen series inspired by Bleach, Thousand-Year Blood War stands shoulders above as a production that exceeded expectations, bookending one of the coolest shonen anime of the modern era.
Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War is streaming on Hulu.
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