The Bleach anime is over. Episode 50 of Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, titled "DEATH & STRAWBERRY," aired on TV Tokyo at 24:00 JST on October 26, which puts the broadcast just past midnight on October 27 in Japan. That closes a television run that began in October 2004.
The episode ends the adaptation of Tite Kubo's final arc and, with it, the anime itself. Two videos went up right after the broadcast.
What the ending movie does
The first is a special ending movie, set to "Number One," the track that has been kicking Bleach fights into gear for two decades. The title logo appears, then the credits for the cast and staff, with original animation drawings flashing past one after another.
The last shot is the one people will remember. A wasteland with the word "despair" carved into it. A footprint stamps down on top. Then "BRAVE" rises out of the print, and the text reads "THE STORIES OF BRAVE."
The second video is THE STORIES VISUAL MOVIE, which gathers the illustration series the production released through the final cour. Fifteen images of Ichigo Kurosaki at different points in the story, from the Substitute Soul Reaper days to an adult Ichigo ten years after the war, and the video walks that same road with him.
The finale itself
The episode jumps a decade. The Seireitei, reduced to scorched earth during the fight against Yhwach, has been rebuilt, and the day the last reconstruction district is finished is also the day a new captain is appointed to the Gotei 13. During the ceremony, the Department of Research and Development picks up an ominous spiritual pressure.
The story closes looking forward, with two children of the next generation carrying it out. If that sounds like a handoff, it is meant to.
The numbers behind 22 years
The manga ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2001 to 2016, ended at 74 volumes, and has passed 130 million copies in circulation worldwide. The first TV anime aired from 2004 to 2012 and never adapted the final arc at all, which is the reason Thousand-Year Blood War existed. It came in four parts: October to December 2022, July to September 2023, October to December 2024, and The Calamity from July 2026. Count the four feature films and the TV total is past 360 episodes.
The final two episodes were pulled from the original broadcast plan and pushed to late October so the production could finish them properly. That decision is the reason the last stretch of the war aired alone, weeks after the rest of the block.
Dates that remain
The anime has ended. The franchise has not. The final cour gets its Japanese home release on March 24, 2027, on Blu-ray and DVD with a soundtrack to match.
There is also BLEACH FES, a two-day event at Makuhari Messe in Chiba on February 27 and 28, 2027. Fifteen voice actors appear across the weekend, among them Masakazu Morita as Ichigo, Fumiko Orikasa as Rukia, Yuki Matsuoka as Orihime, Hiroki Yasumoto as Chad, Noriaki Sugiyama as Uryu, Shinichiro Miki as Urahara, Ryotaro Okiayu as Byakuya and Show Hayami as Aizen. The teaser visual for the event was drawn by Masashi Kudo, the anime's character designer, and echoes the cover of the manga's first volume. That is a deliberate bookend, and a good one.
Twenty-two years, and the final frame is a footprint over the word "despair." Long-running shonen adaptations rarely get to choose their last image. This one did, and it picked something that could be read as a summary of the whole series rather than a trailer for whatever comes next.
Source: Anime Corner and Anime Art Magazine, citing the Bleach anime's official accounts
Source: Anime Corner and Anime Art Magazine, citing the Bleach anime’s official accounts
Featured image: Key art for Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War – The Calamity, via Anime Corner.
