The Bless anime has another name on the cast list. A character promotional video released Thursday confirms that Kōki Uchiyama voices Akiharu Nakano.
The production
Shōtarō Kitamura directs at A-1 Pictures. He is coming off Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!, and Takayuki Kikuchi, who has episode-director credits on Solo Leveling and Kaguya-sama: Love is War, is the assistant director. Fukurou Kamiza is writing and overseeing the scripts after Non Non Biyori Nonstop. Honoka Yokoyama is both character designer and chief animation director, having worked on Oshi no Ko season 2 and Saint Cecilia and Pastor Lawrence. Tetsuya Kawakami and Reina Iwasaki round out the chief animation directors, and Ryō Yoshimata composes the music.
That is a lot of animation-director muscle for a series that has not aired yet, and it says something about how A-1 is treating the material. Fashion manga lives or dies on how the clothes move and how the characters carry themselves, and the studio is stacking the department that decides that.
The manga behind it
Yukino Sonoyama launched Bless in Kodansha’s Shonen Magazine Edge in 2022, and the series now runs in Monthly Shonen Sirius. Kodansha published the ninth volume on October 8, and the manga has more than 1.25 million copies in circulation. Kodansha USA Publishing handles the English release, with the seventh volume out on February 10, and the series is also on the K MANGA digital service.
The story follows Aia and Jun. Aia was told she was destined to be a model. Jun was bullied for her freckles. Together they set out to take back the power to define themselves, in a manga that keeps asking what beauty is actually supposed to mean and what it costs to beat a system that rewards talent over effort.
Why Uchiyama matters here
Uchiyama has become one of the busiest voices in the industry, and he is already on our radar this season for The Boxer, where he leads the cast alongside Kensho Ono and others. Casting him as Akiharu Nakano puts another recognizable name in a show that is otherwise built on fresh faces, which is a common way to anchor a fashion or drama series for viewers who are deciding whether to try it.
The rest of the franchise
Bless is also getting a live-action series, which Amazon Prime Video will stream worldwide exclusively in spring 2027. The anime does not have a premiere date yet, and the character videos are the studio’s way of spacing out those reveals one by one, which usually means a date announcement is somewhere behind the last of them.
For a manga that arrived quietly in a magazine that has since folded into another title, Bless has had a steady build. The circulation number is real, the live-action deal is signed, and the anime has a staff list with genuine credits on it. The remaining question is simply when we get to watch it.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Character video still from the Bless anime, via Anime News Network.
