’Bleach: TYBW’ review: “A” whelming return

One of the most impressive things about the ongoing adaptation of Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War is despite leveraging modern production sensibilities, the anime has continuously “felt” like classic Bleach. It’s not just bringing back the voice cast and keeping Tite Kubo around for every step of the process. The new staff of the newly christened Pierrot Films have a fundamental understanding of what has made Bleach so enduring. Unfortunately, with Bleach: TYBW episode 27, “A,” it seems possible that this understanding is creating some of the same weaknesses. 

Reminder that this was a weekly anime once

Bleach, like its other contemporaries at the time, was a weekly anime and beholden to the various faults with that format. These adaptations often catch up with the source material and find themselves unable to continue the story. Various tricks are employed to make sure an episode hits every week, and Bleach took advantage of all of them – from single recap episodes to multiple anime-only arcs. Bleach’s favorite was the use of in-episode recaps to slow down the pacing; especially as the series kept catching up during the Arrancar saga. 

Which is why as “A” spends a decent amount of its runtime replaying scenes from the previous cour I must say: now this is the Bleach I remember.

From a certain angle, I can’t fault Pierrot Films (spun out from Studio Pierrot in response to TYBW’s success) wanting to show off the fresh animation that deviates from the manga. The first time Shuntara’s bankai was animated was one of the highlights of the second cour’s finale. It filled out a part of the battle the manga couldn’t, but in a way that only improved Kubo’s intent, using his own notes. Even so, doing this detracts from the pacing, which up to this point has been one of TYBW’s biggest strengths. As a result, “A” does very little to move the story forward.

A strange structural choice

More than likely this choice was about refreshing the audience — it’s been just over a year since the anime last aired an episode. Since this was new content even for manga readers, there may have been a desire to make sure everyone recalled this. If so, I hope the lesson learned here is that Pierrot can trust the audience a bit more. Other seasonal anime, the kind that TYBW very clearly wants to play ball with, don’t spend this much time repeating themselves. Even with TV broadcasts still being big in Japan, viewers can now easily refresh themselves as needed. Besides, this far into the series, most of the audience are already the hardcore. 

I am willing to entertain another hypothesis, though. Not only do the reused scenes focus on the deviations from the manga, those scenes do transition to Uryu specifically defeating and killing Shuntara. While all the Squad Zero members lose and die at this point of the story, putting the final move in Uryu’s hands specifically could imply there’s more shifting of the story to come. I don’t think the story itself is changing, Kubo has indicated in multiple ways that there was always more context to explore. It is possible that having this opportunity is too tempting to not add some of that. As a manga reader, I would not complain about Uryu getting a bit more exploration or complication. 

The Almighty is boring

I’ll take anything, because the rest of “A” is all about revealing what Yhwach’s true power is. Which also means the anime has reached the second thing I’ve been dreading: trying to make “nun uh, I saw this coming already” an interesting and compelling power for fights. Temporal shenanigans can work as a potent stakes raising power (see: every climax of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure after part 3) but Yhwach isn’t interesting enough to sell this. 

It’s hardly the first time Bleach has dealt with an antagonist far too powerful for the series to actually handle. But when it finally came time to fight Aizen, his potency increased the harder everyone tried – creating tension through successfully hitting him. Yhwach is practically the opposite – “The Almighty” is an apt description. He’s not just overpowered, he’s barely bothering to try as a result. Ichibē retaliates again with a new attack — not new content, just to get ahead of Jujutsu Kaisen comparisons — and Yhwach walks through it, blows up Ichibē, and moves on. It might seem cool at the moment, but this is effectively how Yhwach is for the rest of the series. 

“The Almighty” is not a full dealbreaker. As the (yet another) fantastic opening showcases, there’s still fights and tension between other characters to come. “A” uses a sizable post-credits scene to inch the story actually forward in a way that should allow TYBW to pick its pace back up next week. Bleach: TYBW episode 27 is not a great kick off to the cour on its own, but it’s difficult to decide what it suggests about the quality of what’s to come. That will be enough to keep everyone watching for now.

Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War is available on Hulu. 

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Featured image ©Tite Kubo/Shueisha, TV TOKYO, dentsu, Pierrot