Bleach 20th Anniversary

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been 20 years since Bleach took the anime world by storm in October 2004. An honorary member of anime’s Big Three, alongside Naruto and One Piece, Bleach was once one of the biggest anime franchises in the world, and paved the way for many shows today. Every once in a while, a new battle shonen centered around defeating ‘demons’ of some kind pops up and reinforces the fact that, without Bleach, the landscape of anime today would have taken on a very different appearance.

However, it feels like Bleach, despite its high-standing in anime culture, has never quite gotten the respect it deserves. It’s sort of the persona non grata of the Big Three, with regular discourse online implying that its spot is not deserved alongside its companions. Even worse, it’s still one of the most common misconceptions around that Bleach’s spot in the Big Three belongs to Dragon Ball, despite Goku’s adventures predating all three shows by a large margin. But why is this? Why does Ichigo feel like an odd one out standing next to Naruto and Luffy, and why had Bleach’s popularity faded away for so many years until its revival in 2022?

Well, in honour of the Bleach anime’s 20th anniversary, today we’ll be celebrating all the things that made the show so great, and all the reasons it deserves its legacy as one of the shonen greats. We’ll also be answering the questions above, and looking at how, with the next part of the Thousand-Year Blood War just around the corner, Bleach’s potential is finally being realised, albeit, far too late compared to its counterparts. Now, let’s dive back in time and look over the last 20 years of Bleach.

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20 Years of Bleach

Image by Pierrot

While it’s the 20th anniversary of the anime adaptation of Bleach specifically, it’s worth laying out Tite Kubo’s manga’s presence in comparison to its Big Three counterparts. Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece began serialization in Shonen Jump back in 1997, followed by the debut of Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto in 1999. Two years after Naruto came Kubo’s Bleach, beginning seralization in 2001. These dates are worth mentioning, because much like with its manga debut, the anime adaptation of Bleach premiered last out of the Big Three, with the One Piece anime premiering in 1999, and Naruto kicking off in 2002.

This meant that from the jump, Bleach walked in the shadow of its Big Three peers. By the time it hit our screens in 2004, One Piece and Naruto had well-established fan bases. This is not to say that Bleach tried to ride their coattails though – if anything, doing that would have been the easier option. Instead, Bleach opted to take a darker route. Though in their later arcs both Naruto and One Piece have dealt with some pretty dark themes, Bleach was a much more mature story from the jump, with its plot centered on topics like monsters, spirits, and death. Compared to the family-friendly worlds of pirates and ninjas in early One Piece and Naruto, Bleach was destined to stand out.

Bleach’s darker tones did help it stand out, and though certain Shonen Jump readers were likely enthralled by its brutality, when it came to the anime, Bleach’s darker tones would lead to its downfall – mainly because Studio Pierrot wasn’t willing to commit to them. Back in the day, anime were frequently subjected to censorship, and honestly, the issue hasn’t completely faded away. Compare some brutal scenes in your favourite anime to their original versions in the manga, and you’ll be shocked by how much more graphic the scenes originally were. Given just how brutal the Bleach manga was, however, and considering that its Big Three partners were relatively child-friendly, the Bleach anime was hit by censorship – and it was hit hard.

Image by Pierrot

Bleach’s story found its footing in its many fights and conflicts, and the censorship inflicted on the show stripped so much of that away, the essence of it faded along with its brutality. Bleach was left as an anime that, while trying to come across as dark and edgy, couldn’t commit to the energy of Kubo’s manga. Now that it’s returned in recent years, and has been allowed to be more gory and bloody in the modern anime scene, fans are starting to realise that the greatness of the Thousand-Year Blood War has always been a part of Bleach – it was just never allowed to thrive.

This is not to say that original Bleach is a bad anime, by any means. The anime simply felt like a less authentic representation of the source material than One Piece or Naruto, and so it lost some of the heart that those other shows possess so much of. Where Bleach’s anime did succeed, however, was in its style and animation. The character designs, the music, the animation of the fight scenes – all of these things let Bleach revel in its own uniqueness, and set it apart from its contemporaries. Despite its censorship, Bleach was always an exciting watch, and though the anime was subsequently lighter in tone than the original manga, it still managed to feel alive.

Admittedly, Bleach was also a lot more consistent than either of the other Big Three shows, in both quality and tone. There’s no significant section of Bleach that stands out as weak, and there’s also no crazy tonal swings either (aside from filler, but we’ll get to that soon). This meant that fans tuning into Bleach each week knew what to expect – great fights, incredible music, and a solid story. The show never truly caught its fans off guard, which some may see as a weakness, but in many ways, its consistency was a credit. So why, then, did Bleach fall flat as it moved into the 2010s?

Image by Pierrot

In March 2012, the Bleach anime met its end, abruptly concluding after the finale of one of the series’ weaker arcs involving the Fullbringers. Why exactly the show was cancelled has been debated. Some people say it’s because the anime caught up to the manga, and Pierrot would have had to turn to filler for a huge chunk of episodes, and others cite the series’ declining popularity as cause for cancellation. Whatever the reason, no one can deny that Bleach’s popularity was waning in its final years. The loss of the anime adaptation was the final nail in the coffin.

Though both One Piece and Naruto are no stranger to filler episodes, particularly the latter, Bleach held the highest filler percentage of the three. A whopping 45% of Bleach episodes are nothing but filler, non-canon content that didn’t progress the story in any way. Given that the series is not that long by default compared to the other Big Three series, this percentage was particularly impactful. Lumps of filler episodes combined with weaker arcs in its later stages marked the end for Bleach – at least until 2022.

For the ten years between 2012 and 2022, though, Bleach suffered from a content drought, which did nothing to help its already dwindling popularity. One Piece carried on as One Piece always has, with an unshakeable fanbase and consistent episodes, and though the curtain fell on Naruto in 2017, Boruto premiered less than a month later, and kept the world of Naruto alive (as much as it probably shouldn’t have). Bleach was left to fade away, its memory kept alive only by its fanbase. In many ways, it’s miraculous that Bleach has managed to bounce back in recent years as it has, but if anything, that only speaks to how strong the series once was, and how influential it’s been on anime’s modern sensibilities.

Image by Pierrot

Nowadays, Bleach is doing great, as the adaptation of the Thousand-Year Blood War continues to highlight what could have been if the whole manga had been adapted with as much passion and ferocity as this arc. Looking past the spectacle, the story of Bleach has remained consistent. Nothing about the plot of the Thousand-Year Blood War is particularly advanced in comparison to the original anime’s arcs. Its modern-day success lies in the show’s ability now to let its world, characters, and unique vibe thrive.

If anything, the modern success of Bleach proves something that Bleach fans have been saying about the series since its debut – it is, by far, the coolest of the Big Three. Perhaps this is why so many modern shonen anime have taken inspiration from Bleach. Plenty of today’s shonen owe inspiration to Kubo’s work, but in particular, Bleach can be credited as the main influence of the Dark Shonen Trio, a triad of contemporary action anime that have found success in their takes on themes introduced to shonen by Bleach – Hell’s Paradise, Chainsaw Man, and of course, Jujutsu Kaisen.

And so, 20 years on, it’s important to look back at Bleach and recognise that, despite some of its faults, the anime is more than deserving of being named alongside Naruto and One Piece as a Big Three member. In celebrating the anime’s anniversary, viewers will quickly find that the uninhibited version of Bleach that we see today, as well as some of the other incredible modern shonen shows we know and love, have only been made possible by original Bleach’s breaking of the mold that haunted the shonen scene. Back in 2004, Bleach proved that maturity and darkness could go hand-in-hand with the shonen genre, and though that point wasn’t able to be fully realised back in the day, the risks that Bleach took can be credited as the reason anime is in such a good place today. So, as much as we love Naruto and One Piece, Bleach deserves its spot right there with them, and 20 years on, that sentiment is more discernible than ever.

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Conclusion

Image by Pierrot

All 16 seasons of original Bleach are available to stream right now on Disney Plus. Also available on Disney Plus are all episodes of Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, and with Part 3 of this arc just around the corner, now is a great time to get a refresher on all the greatness the anime has to offer over the last 20 years. Part 3 of the Thousand-Year Blood War begins on Disney Plus on October 5 2024.

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