Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War E01 Review: Bankai-ing it Up Like It's 2012

Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, Episode 1: The Blood Warfare

After a decade since its end (holy hell I'm old) and way too many fake news about how 2013 is totally the year Bleach is returning, no, wait, 2015, honest, 2016? 2017? No, after the live-action adaptation, surely! No, the spinoff manga Burn the Witch is totally a sign the anime is coming back! No, it takes a full decade, apparently. Finally, Bleach is getting its final and honestly rather controversially-paced arc adapted into anime format. 

And... Bleach holds a special place in my heart. My very first serialized manga was Full Metal Alchemist, but I didn't really read too much manga until the year of 2011 or so, when I finally sat down and read a lot of the 'big' manga names at the time. Naruto, Bleach and One Piece were the Big Three, and the former two were entering their respective final arcs. And Bleach... well, Bleach was always one of the most stylish mangas I've ever read, full stop, and that includes any and all other manga I've read. The anime, while the quality of the animation (and the unfortunate censorship it does) might not be the most consistent, was helped by the absolutely rocking soundtrack that introduced me to a whole new genre of music -- rock opera. It's just such a shame that... Bleach was kinda 'done dirty' by the industry. The anime wrapped up after the Fullbringer arc and never went to adapt the manga's final arc, when other Shonen series (Dragon Ball, Naruto) were allowed to continue and even basically act as sequels for their respective source materials. And the quality of Dragon Ball Super and Boruto are highly debatable, but they got something when Bleach didn't even get the existing manga volumes sitting on shelves adapted.

Then came the year 2022, and... Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War dropped. 

And episode one adapts the first couple of chapters of the arc, and... I'm very optimistic! I am so hyped, inordinately so, especially with the announcement that the anime will adapt things a bit differently to fix a lot of the problems that the final 20-or-so chapters of Bleach had. We'll see!

And I'm not sure if I'll be reviewing this per episode, or if it'll ultimately devolve into the 'three-to-seven episodes per batch' that I'm doing with One Piece and Wano. So long as I'm reasonably excited, I suppose! 

And I'm not sure how I'm going to talk about this, because, like the One Piece episodes... I have read these chapters before. I already know what's going to happen. But the opening of the TYBW arc does feel like a nice place to do a soft-reboot episode, yeah? We start off with the two Shinigami assigned to Karakura Town -- Shino and Ryunosuke -- running around and getting mauled and nearly killed by the sudden arrival of giant hordes of Hollows summoned by a Quincy. 

And the way this sequence is played is genuinely pretty creepy, and yet still as stylish as ever. The constant cutaways to parts of Karakura Town (which looks good) to show a traffic light at green... and then for the traffic light to become red when Ryunosuke meets the giant Hollows? The Hollow chase is also extended a bit more to make these beings feel a bit more monstrous, and I can't believe just how cool this scene of just two lower-ranked Shinigami being bullied by Hollows ended up being. How much of a horrifying sequence it is for poor Ryunosuke, running around chased by that giant spider-Hollow, trying his best to find his only hope... only to see his commanding officer already bloodied and maybe dead in the clutches of a half-dozen giant Hollows? 

And then in come our heroes, with the epic superhero music and Shiro Sagisu's always banging tunes replacing the silence that gripped Ryunosuke, and we get a brief shot of every one of Ichigo and his buddies' names -- something that a lot of newer anime like to do. The anime extends the Hollow fight by showing our heroes actually fighting them! Orihime, Chad and Uryu use their powers, then Ichigo goes BAN! KAI! And yells GETSUGA TENSHOU for the first time in a decade and I'm just happy. It's a scene that's extended from its manga counterpart, and while I'm not going to hem and haw about every extended scene out there, it's a neat way to extend this. 

And holy hell, the animation! The animation is so cool! I've been spoiled lately with how good the Wano anime looked, with how good other recent anime like Demon Slayer or Cyberpunk looked, but damn. From the animation of the Getsuga Tenshou to the effects of Genryusai's flames or the giant Quincy arrow-thing that impales Sasakibe or Chad's La Muerte causing a building to explode into a giant skull, or Ebern's dizzying fight with Ichigo around a bridge... all so very beautifully animated. 

And as we get reintroduced to Ichigo and his buddies in the real world, we do get brief cutaways to the Soul Society, and... now we know what's going on with Mayuri's lab, or Ikkaku and Yumichika investigating the missing villages. But for now it all remains a mystery as the episode closes out with a dual set of action scenes. 

A group of Quincies arrive in the Soul Society base, right where Genryusai Yamamoto is just hanging out... and then we actually get to see the brief lightning as Sasakibe activates his Bankai... then the poor dude gets fucking impaled and sent crashing into Genryusai's office with a big-ass light spear through his gut. The poor, poor Vice-Captain of the First Division is never anyone's favourite character and is barely relevant in the manga (he gets a couple bonus scenes in the anime filler arcs) but it's a nice little showcase of how the Wandenreich are definitely going around killing named characters. 

There's also a very appreciated bit of detail that people online pointed out wasn't in the manga -- Luders Friegen and his fellow Quincies actually consistently stand in the shadow of one of the pillars in Genryusai's office, which ties into something that is established a bit later on in the manga. 

Meanwhile, in the real world, as Ichigo and company muck around with Ryunosuke, someone who appears to be an Arrancar appears in Ichigo's bed... and its' Asguiaro Ebern, a character I 100% forgot existed, and he's backlit amazingly by the window. Absolutely love how he's trying to sell himself as basically a big badass villain and Ichigo's just very angry that this random mofo is standing on his bed. Ichigo and Ebern fight in a pretty cool manner across the skies of Karakura Town, and Ebern, of course, reveals that he has a Quicny pendant and summons a giant... well, it's not a bow, is it? It's a big-ass crescent with four fucking reishi-beam cannons. 

And we get the wonderful frame of Ebern's face contorting in an over-the-top excited manner as he sees Ichigo finally activate his Bankai. Of course, Ebern fails to steal Tensa Zangetsu, but man, it's such a cool moment that added into what is otherwise a pretty basic hype-building fight. And then we finally take a look at Juhabach (or Yhwach, I guess, is how I'm supposed to spell his name) in his shadow palace... and both Friegen and Ebern bow before Yhwach and he casually just dismembers Friegen as he dos some ominous proclamations. 

Pretty well-done, honestly. Again, the corresponding chapters in the manga aren't bad, but... but this just kind of elevates the source material a lot, yeah? The music, the voice-acting, the far more improved animation (by dint of being 10 years after the end of the previous anime)... definitely an adaptation that faithfully adapts the Thousand-Year Blood War and even elevates aspects of it. Great first episode for sure!

Random Notes:

• Some changes have been made from the previous anime, most notably the colour of Icchigo's Getsuga, which now matches its intended manga counterpart (which was meant to look like a moon!) 
• The credits end with a montage of literally the highlights of the entire Bleach anime, before closing off with one of the poems from the tankobon volumes.
• It's definitely something that gets lost since 90% of Bleach is action, but I do appreciate Ichigo, Orihime, Chad and Uryu bitching and arguing about bread. An understated moment is Uryu of all people leaving one of the yakisoba bread for Ryunosuke because 'he might like it' while the others call the normally-serious Uryu out on him being the one that doesn't want to eat it himself. 
• This brings me memories back! I started this blog reviewing the final chapters of Bleach as well. I'm not sure, again, whether I'll make this a weekly thing, or if subsequent episodes are going to be a bit shorter in length like my One Piece/MHA anime reviews, but we'll see!