For close to 50 seconds, the last trailer for “Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War” refuses to show you anything in color. It opens on black smoke and lets the word BLEACH surface out of it. Then it runs the whole war back in grainy black and white, one Japanese title card at a time, before the screen floods pink and red and the finale finally starts. VIZ Media and the official Bleach YouTube channel released it on Friday, October 16th, as the lead-in to the final two episodes of “The Calamity,” the fourth and last part of the anime. Episode 49 streams on Monday, October 19th, and episode 50, the series finale, follows on Monday, October 26th, both at 8:30 AM PT on Hulu in the US, with Disney+ carrying them internationally. It is a confident, almost stubborn piece of editing, and it reads like a studio that knows exactly how much is riding on these last two weeks.
Those episodes were supposed to be on screens a month ago. “The Calamity” premiered on TV Tokyo on July 25th as a ten-episode run. Then, on Saturday, September 12th, the production committee pushed episodes 49 and 50 back to October, explaining, in Anime News Network’s summary, that “the staff is improving the quality of the anime as it heads toward its climax.” TV Tokyo filled the gap with a “climax selection” of reruns, and the show moved from its Saturday 11 p.m. slot to Monday at midnight. A delay this close to the finish line can read like trouble, but it may have been the right call. CBR pointed out that “Life to Defend You,” the fifth episode of this part, scored a 9.7 on IMDb, the highest for any Bleach episode, while the three that followed slid to 9.2, 8.9 and 8.1. A month of extra polish on the ending is easier to forgive than a finale that limps. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War” and for everything shown in the last trailer for its final two episodes.
It is a confident, almost stubborn piece of editing, and it reads like a studio that knows exactly how much is riding on these last two weeks.”
The first half of the trailer is a eulogy for the three parts that came before. Over the opening title card, a long-coated figure stands still, ranks of soldiers line up in silhouette, and a lone figure waits in the rain, all of it washed out to gray. VIZ’s English upload labels that card “Thousand-Year Blood War,” while the Japanese upload calls the same stretch “The Blood Warfare,” a small difference that most viewers will never notice. Then the Japanese title of each part is stamped down the middle of the frame in brushed calligraphy, with VIZ adding an English name beneath it: 訣別譚 for “The Separation,” over bursts of light and shattered shapes, and 相剋譚 for “The Conflict,” which ends on Ichigo Kurosaki (Masakazu Morita) glancing up from the bottom of the frame at a towering hooded figure. The third card, 禍進譚, is “The Calamity” itself, and its last few seconds are still in monochrome, with Ichigo’s face carved up by dark markings and a smoking wasteland of broken rock behind him.
At the 48-second mark the color arrives, and it is not subtle. A forest glows hot pink, red petals drift over a cluster of rooftops, and a ring of green light burns at the top of a tall black peak. Yhwach (Takayuki Sugō) is seen first as a silhouette, long hair studded with open eyes, raised against a blinding white light inside a tangle of branches. A shaft of light drops onto a tiny figure in the middle of a red forest, a red ring is slashed through by a thorned X, and a huge shape lit sickly green, covered in eyes, reaches both hands toward the camera. The editors give that image only a second. That is probably wise, because the less of it you see before the episodes air, the more it will land when it does.
Then the trailer finds Ichigo. A lone figure walks across a red plain between two walls of fire, and the next shots move in close: the back of his orange head, a white bolt of energy splitting the frame, blood on his shoulder, and Ichigo braced in a sword stance as a red slash cuts past him. That run stops dead on a plain card with the two dates, 10.19 and 10.26, over “Monday 8:30AM PT,” which the Japanese version swaps for “Monday 24:00,” the TV Tokyo slot. Putting the dates in the middle of the trailer instead of at the end is a neat trick. It splits the footage into two acts, and it makes the second one feel like the countdown has already started.
The second act is faster and much bloodier. Ichigo swings his blade through a trail of yellow fire, a dark cloak with orange stripes flaring behind him, and Uryu Ishida (Noriaki Sugiyama) appears behind a blue energy bow in his white Quincy clothes. In quick succession there is a pair of eyes lit pink behind a white beam, a pale, blood-streaked face breaking into a smile, a dark-haired fighter tangled in red thorned vines and a bearded man in a white cloak reaching straight at the lens. The trailer does not name any of them. It is cut too fast to be sure who every face belongs to, so fans will be freeze-framing those four shots for a week. A second card then spells it out in block letters: “THE LAST 2 EPISODES.”
After that card, almost everything is Ichigo against Yhwach. The eye-covered silhouette looms out of the red forest twice, a huge cleaver-shaped blade on a chain sweeps across a field the color of a bruise, and Ichigo, shirtless under a torn striped cloak, lifts his sword over his head with both hands against a yellow sky. He snarls, bloodied, a pale-haired fighter screams into the red light, and one figure leaps at the eye-covered shape with a sword drawn among the red trees. The last shot of the action is a bloodied face with its eyes wide open and its mouth open, maybe rage, maybe shock, and the trailer cuts to black on it without telling you which.
The ending is almost silent on screen. Small text reads “Ichigo Kurosaki, the final battle,” and VIZ’s version adds a single subtitled line over the darkness: “It’s time for the end.” The voice is never shown, which keeps the line hanging, and it is the only dialogue in the whole trailer. The BLEACH logo returns, and a closing card lists episode 49 on October 19th and episode 50 on October 26th, with “Watch on Hulu on Disney+” underneath. The palette is the real tell. The past is drawn in gray and the finale in red, pink and gold, which might be the clearest statement the trailer makes. The people making it seem to treat the ending as its own thing rather than one more episode of the war.
That fits what the official synopsis for episode 49 promises. In it, Yhwach appears at the same time in the Seireitei, the World of the Living and Hueco Mundo, and declares his intention to “reduce the world to nothingness” and build a new one free of what the synopsis calls the “fear of life” and the “fear of death.” Ichigo, described as having “risen from the depths of despair,” stands against him with the Soul Reapers and the Arrancars. That three-front invasion is bigger than what Tite Kubo drew in the manga, where the final fight was relatively short, and ComicBook.com notes that the anime has “extended it with Yhwach fully invading all three territories.” Anime Corner reports that Kubo himself confirmed this last part would carry even more original material than the earlier ones, which is either the best news in this trailer or the riskiest, depending on how much you trust the anime to improve on its own source.
The staff list is full of familiar names wearing new titles. Pierrot Films is animating, Tomohisa Taguchi, who directed the earlier parts, is now chief director, and Hikaru Murata, previously a co-chief episode director, now directs, with Masaki Hiramatsu on series composition and Shiro Sagisu on the music. Kubo is supervising the adaptation, and that matters more here than anywhere else, because this is the ending readers have had since 2016 and anime fans waited years to see animated at all. The first three episodes of “The Calamity” even ran in US theaters from June 25th to June 29th before the broadcast began. With only two episodes left, every unanswered question about how much the anime will change now sits on the same two Monday mornings.
Japan is giving the finale a send-off of its own. The day before the last episode, on October 25th, United Cinemas Aqua City Odaiba is hosting a marathon screening and talk with Masakazu Morita, Noriaki Sugiyama, Kubo, Murata and animation producer Sadahiko Tominaga. Two names that are nowhere in this trailer have also already been cast: Azusa Tachibana voices Kazui Kurosaki and Ayaka Ohashi voices Ichika Abarai, and ComicBook.com says both debut in the epilogue that follows the fight with Yhwach. English dub fans have a longer wait, since ComicBook.com reports the dubbed episode 49 lands on November 23rd and episode 50 on November 30th.
What Do You Think? Who is the bearded man reaching for the camera, and who is smiling through all that blood, two shots before “THE LAST 2 EPISODES”? Does the anime’s three-front invasion make the final fight with Yhwach better than the manga’s, or does it risk losing the speed that made Kubo’s ending hit so hard? And after a month-long delay, can episodes 49 and 50 climb back to the heights of “Life to Defend You”?
Catch up properly: every “Bleach” story in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Bleach timeline.
See you on the next binge!
