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Tite Kubo’s Bleach is Back Along with Burn the Witch

Nathan Dalton March 23, 2020

Tite Kubo's Bleach is Back for its 20th Anniversary — Tite Kubo's Bleach is back for its 20th anniversary. Image Source: Tite Kubo and Shonen Jump

Shonen Jump’s official YouTube channel hosted a livestream to announce a new project celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Bleach. Tite Kubo wrote and illustrated Bleach for its entire run in Weekly Shonen Jump from 2001-2016. It was collected into 74 volumes and was one of Shonen’s “Big Three” for many years, along with Naruto and One Piece.

We are greeted by a graphic saying “Project No.1…” and a date taking us to later this year. It shows Burn the Witch and some characters drawn in Tite Kubo’s famous art style featuring thin lines and long characters. Burn the Witch will be serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump starting later this year and will be turned into an animated movie this year. It was originally a one-shot manga in 2018 that received rave reviews from fans and editors. In comics, a one-shot is a single issue with a self-contained story, so after its release, there was no guarantee that it would ever be anything more. This is common in manga, as Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece all began as one-shots. The trailer for the animated feature can be found below.

“Project N.2…” is coming in 2021, but it is more Bleach! This short animation of manga panels from Bleach’s Thousand-Year Blood War arc. This arc was written and illustrated in the manga but never adapted into the anime before it ceased production at the conclusion of the Fullbringer arc. However, it will finally be animated!

Yoshiyuki Hirai hosts a panel of the Japanese cast, while being translated (for the most part, only dates and official announcement facts are translated) live by a representative, Matt, from KLab, the mobile game development company that is in charge of Bleach: Brave Souls. Bleach: Brave Souls is a mobile game for Android and iPhone that launched early 2016, right before Bleach ended its manga publication later that year. The anime had ended 4 years prior, in 2012. Since the end of publication, the only way to get new Bleach content was Bleach: Brave Souls, as Tite Kubo had partnered with KLab to design new character styles.