Bless has another cast member and a streaming home. The anime’s staff revealed in a character promotional video on Thursday that Tarusuke Shingaki voices Hikaru Oya. The same day, Crunchyroll announced it will stream the series worldwide outside Japan and China when it debuts in January.
Crunchyroll Picks It Up
For an A-1 Pictures adaptation with no confirmed premiere date yet, the Crunchyroll deal is the bigger piece of news. A worldwide simulcast locks in the show’s international reach before the Japanese broadcast schedule is even final, which is how most of the season’s mid-tier titles are handled now: the platform commits early, and the announcement doubles as marketing for a date that comes later.
Shingaki’s role is Hikaru Oya, one of the supporting cast around the leads. The reveal came through a character video rather than a press release, the same format the production has used for its other cast announcements this year.
Staff and Studio
The production is at A-1 Pictures. Shōtarō Kitamura directs, coming off Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!, a series that had to juggle a large cast of girls with distinct comic rhythms. Takayuki Kikuchi is the assistant director, with episode direction on Solo Leveling and Kaguya-sama: Love is War behind him. Fukurou Kamiza writes and oversees the scripts, having worked on Non Non Biyori Nonstop. Honoka Yokoyama is both character designer and chief animation director, with credits on Oshi no Ko’s second season and Saint Cecilia and Pastor Lawrence. Tetsuya Kawakami and Reina Iwasaki are also chief animation directors, and Ryō Yoshimata, whose work includes Somali and the Forest Spirit and After the Rain, composes the music.
The Manga Behind It
Yukino Sonoyama’s manga is the source. It debuted in Kodansha’s Shonen Magazine Edge in 2022 and now runs in Monthly Shonen Sirius, and Kodansha published the ninth volume on October 8. The series has more than 1.25 million copies in circulation. Kodansha USA Publishing releases it in English, with the translation running behind the Japanese volumes, and the digital chapters are on K MANGA.
The premise is not the usual idol or fashion-school setup. Aia has been told since childhood that she is destined to be a model. Jun has been bullied for her freckles. They end up working together, and the manga uses their partnership to ask what it means to be judged on appearance and what it takes to take that judgment back. A sports manga where the sport is looking acceptable is a strange, specific idea, and it is the reason the series found readers beyond the usual fashion-manga audience.
Amazon Prime Video is also making a live-action Bless series for spring 2027, streaming worldwide exclusively. That puts the anime and the live-action version in the same year, both aimed at an international audience, which is a notable amount of simultaneous investment in a title that has only been running since 2022.
What Is Left to Announce
January is still the only date anyone has. With Crunchyroll on board for a worldwide simulcast and a cast list that keeps growing, a specific premiere date is the announcement left to make, and it will probably arrive with a full trailer. Wound & Bandage already has a January 9 slot, so the winter calendar is filling in around it.
The risk for Bless is tonal. A manga about beauty standards and self-determination is easy to flatten into a story about an ugly girl who becomes pretty, and the source is more pointed than that. Whether the anime keeps that edge is a directing question, and Kitamura has shown he can carry an ensemble comedy without losing the smaller, quieter character work underneath it.
Shingaki’s casting does not answer that question, and casting announcements rarely do. What it does show is a production filling out its supporting cast steadily, one character at a time, which usually means the recording schedule is well underway rather than still being planned. The previous cast reveal followed the same pattern.
Anyone who wants to catch up on the manga has nine volumes to work through before the show lands, and the English release is running a little under a year behind the Japanese one.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Hikaru Oya character video still from the Bless anime, via Anime News Network.
