More details about the new season of the Bleach anime will be announced at this year's Jump Festa.
As reported by the Mainichi Shimbun, Shuiesha, the publisher behind the popular manga magazine Weekly Shonen Jump, has announced that more information about the impending return of the Bleach anime will be revealed at the company's yearly fan festival, Jump Festa. The return of the series was originally announced in March 2020, when it was revealed that a new season of the anime was in production. The new season will adapt the Thousand-Year Blood War arc from the manga, which was originally published after Bleach's anime adaptation, which ran from 2004 - 2012, ended its broadcast run. Jump Festa will be held on Dec. 18 - 19, both online and as an in-person event in Chiba, Japan.
While Shueisha's teaser statement specifically mentions the Bleach anime, fans are also hoping for the announcement of a new continuation to Tite Kubo's manga. A new chapter of the manga, which was written and drawn by Kubo himself, was published last August to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the series' debut. While the chapter was originally promoted as a one-off, standalone story, the manga's plot seemed to set up a new conflict for Ichigo and the rest of Soul Society. Since the anniversary chapter's release, fans have been eagerly anticipating the announcement of a sequel series to continue the story, but so far, both Kubo and Shueisha have remained quiet on the topic.
Bleach debuted in 2001 and was one of the most popular anime and manga franchises of the early 2000s. The series is one of the best-selling manga of all time, with over 120 million copies in circulation around the world. In 2004, Studio Pierrot, the same animation company that also produced the anime adaptation for the era's other big shonen franchise, Naruto, began adapting the manga into a TV anime series. The manga was also turned into a live-action movie in 2018 by Warner Bros. Japan, which starred Kamen Rider Fourze's Sota Fukushi as Ichigo and Boys Over Flowers' Hana Sugisaki as Rukia. The series was also adapted into multiple video games by Sonic the Hedgehog and Yakuza publisher Sega.
The original Bleach anime is available for streaming on Netflix, Hulu and Crunchyroll. The manga is distributed both digitally and in print by VIZ Media, which also publishes Tite Kubo's latest work, Burn the Witch, a Bleach spinoff.
Source: Mainichi Shimbun (Mantan Web)