Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War Fan Series Drops New Trailer

Tite Kubo’s Bleach was one of the most popular action series to come out of Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump for a time, but the popularity of the series began to wane as it neared its end game. Unfortunately for fans of the series, it was brought to a truncated end in both its manga and anime runs. The anime’s early ending is a particularly sore one for fans as they never got to see the final arc of the series, the Thousand-Year Blood War, brought to life officially.

With the anime gone and no signs of a return on the horizon, fans have taken it upon themselves to bring this final arc to life through animation. One of the most ambitious projects is Retro Ryno’s BLEACH: TYBW fan series, which recently shared a new teaser for its second big episode. You can check it out in the video above!

The first episode of this ambitious project was released last November, so fans have been eagerly anticipating the debut of its second episode. As fans have noted with this teaser, there has already been a marked improvement for the series’ animation. It was already impressive given that it’s accomplishing what the anime did not, but now fans are curious to see just how the first big battle of the arc turns out.

The teaser invokes the first major fight of the arc, in which Ichigo suddenly begins to fight against Asguiaro Ebern, who seems to be an Arrancar until he unveils that he’s controlling some Quincy powers. From there, the arc truly kicks into action and fans are definitely sticking around to see just how far Retro Ryno’s project will go.

With the help of Johnny Yong Bosch, the voice of Ichigo in the original English dub of the anime, returning to once again portray Ichigo, the ceiling is certainly high for this one.

Bleach was first created by Tite Kubo for Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump, running from 2001 to 2016. The series follows the young delinquent Ichigo Kurosaki, who has the ability to see spirits. He soon obtains the power of a Soul Reaper – one meant to usher lost souls to the afterlife – and now has the duty to defend the living world from monstrous dark spirits known as Hollows.

It has been adapted into English thanks to VIZ Media, and has sold over 900 million copies in Japan. The series was later adapted into an anime by Studio Pierrot from 2004 to 2012, and has four feature-length animations, rock musicals, video games, and a ton of other merchandise. You can currently find the series now streaming on Hulu. There’s also a live-action adaptation on Netflix, and you can find ComicBook.com’s review of the film here.