A new promotional video and key visual for the upcoming Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War anime was released during Shueisha's Jump Festa '22 event on Saturday.
The series will premier sometime in October 2022 and will air on TV Tokyo and its associated stations. The upcoming anime will cover the remainder of Tite Kubo’s Bleach manga, picking up from where the original anime series left off.
The event also revealed the staff and cast. Studio Pierrot will return to animate the series, though director Noriyuki Abe will be replaced by Tomohisa Taguchi. Taguchi is best known for his work on Akudama Drive, Twin Star Exorcists, and the second and fourth Persona 3 films. Original character designer and composer Masashi Kudo and Shiro Sagisu are set to return.
Masakazu Morita and Fumiko Orikasa will reprise their roles as Ichigo and Rukia, respectively. Most of the original cast members will reprise their roles, as will those who played characters from the Bleach: Brave Souls game not yet featured in the anime.
The Bleach manga’s Thousand Year Blood War arc served as the final arc of the series, running from volume 55-74. A 15-minute recap video covering all major events from the original series was released alongside the new material.
Tite Kubo’s Bleach was serialized in Shueisha’s Shonen Jump and Weekly Shonen Jump from 2001-2016. The beloved series is one of the most successful manga of its time, standing as the 11th best-selling manga in history.
Studio Pierrot produced an anime adaptation from 2004-2012. The series ran for 366 episodes and inspired four anime films which were released between 2006 and 2010. The manga and anime’s popularity led to various game adaptations and spinoffs, light novels, a trading card game, and a musical titled; Rock Musical Bleach.
In the years following Bleach’s finale, Kubo has most notably contributed the character designs for the 2019 Sakura Wars reboot, and has begun work on a new series; Burn the Witch. The series started off as a one-shot and takes place in the same universe Bleach. It would eventually be developed into a full-fledged series, starting serialization in 2020 in Weekly Shonen Jump. One collected volume has been released so far.
Source: Anime News Network