Bleach’s Anime Ends After 22 Years. Ichigo’s Voice Says It Still Doesn’t Feel Finished

Published October 27, 2026 Chloe Barnett anime, Bleach, Fumiko Orikasa, Masakazu Morita, Noriaki Sugiyama, Seiyuu, Thousand-Year Blood War

Bleach’s TV anime has ended after 22 years. The last episode aired in Japan at midnight on Monday, and the actor who has voiced Ichigo Kurosaki since 2004 says it still doesn’t feel over. At a screening the day before, he and his castmates explained something fans rarely hear about: what it’s like to voice the biggest battle of your career before anyone has finished drawing it.

Episode 50, “DEATH & STRAWBERRY,” closed Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, The Calamity, on TV Tokyo stations at 24:00 on Monday, October 26, Japan time. It went online from noon on Tuesday. With it, the anime that started in October 2004 has told the whole of Tite Kubo’s manga, all the way to the final chapter.

Before the finale, ORICON NEWS sat down with Masakazu Morita, the Japanese voice of Ichigo, and Fumiko Orikasa, the voice of Rukia Kuchiki. They’ve been partners on this show since the first episode. Neither of them sounded ready to say goodbye.

“It doesn’t feel finished at all”

“I’ve played it through to the end, but strangely, it doesn’t feel finished at all,” Morita said. Part of that is practical. “There’s still recording for games and so on, so I don’t think of Thousand-Year Blood War as the last time I’ll play Ichigo.”

When he walked back into the Bleach studio for Thousand-Year Blood War in 2022, after about ten years off the air, he was nervous. It didn’t last. “The moment I stepped in, it just snapped back to the old days,” he said. “The atmosphere in the studio hadn’t changed at all.”

Image: © Tite Kubo/Shueisha, TV Tokyo, dentsu, Pierrot, via BLEACH official YouTube channel

Orikasa felt the same. “Thankfully, that hasn’t changed, and there’s a sense of security in having everyone there,” she said. “We understand each other without exchanging a word.” Morita compared the cast to a family more than old classmates, and then couldn’t resist a Bleach joke. “It’s like relatives gathering for a memorial service,” he said. “Fitting, for Soul Reapers.”

Voicing a battle nobody has finished drawing

On Sunday, October 25, the night before the finale, Morita joined Noriaki Sugiyama, the voice of Uryu Ishida, on stage at United Cinema Aqua City Odaiba in Tokyo. Fans had just watched episodes 41 to 49 in a row. Kubo, director Hikaru Murata and animation producer Yoshihiko Tominaga were there too, and the official report of the event, published by eeo Media, is full of shop talk.

The talk kept coming back to episode 45, “DEFEND YOU,” an episode made entirely of new scenes that aren’t in the manga. Tominaga said chief director Tomohisa Taguchi wanted it to have lip sync and smooth, film-like movement, because it was a climax. The voice cast recorded their lines long before any of that was finished.

“When we’re actually recording, the picture is nowhere near that finished,” Morita said. “So when the finished version came on TV, I went, ‘Huh? What is this?'” Sugiyama said the same thing hit him when he watched it with everything in place. “Compared with when we record our voices, seeing it with the music, the colour and all the effects added, the impact was tremendous.”

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For Sugiyama, the hardest part of the new scenes was judging how big to play them. “I reread the manga again before recording, but with the original scenes, I was thinking, ‘How much emotion is it OK to show?’ and ‘Would it be better to hold back?'” he said. Those scenes lead into moments that are in the manga, so he was also asking himself how far he could go. Much of it, he said, came from “the temperature of the back and forth” with Yuichiro Umehara, who voices his opponent in that fight, Haschwalth. “We’d try it in the test, get directions like ‘a bit more like this,’ and I found it in that flow.”

That’s a rare look at how anime voice work happens in Japan: actors reading against rough or unfinished animation, a director’s note between the test and the take, and a scene partner’s energy deciding the pitch. It’s also why fans who only see the finished episode can underrate how much the voices are guessing in the dark.

A cast that grew up together

Twenty-two years is a long time to share a microphone, and both actors talked about their characters the way you’d talk about old friends. Ichigo has become, Morita said, “a role my career couldn’t do without.” He realised it when people around the world started calling him “Ichigo” on sight. Orikasa ended the interview with a line fans will like. “I really feel the relationship between those two will never change.”

What comes next

Morita isn’t treating the finale as a farewell. “Ichigo is still a character who isn’t finished,” he told ORICON NEWS, “and one I can keep growing with.” At the screening he signed off in character, telling the crowd in Ichigo’s voice to watch the last episode the next night, and then led the whole room, and everyone watching the stream, in a call and response of “Bankai!”

Kubo had one more surprise. He said he’d drawn two brand new characters for the final episode, both middle-aged men, and didn’t know whether one or both would make it in. “I haven’t seen the final episode yet, so I’ll watch it with all of you,” he said. The finale also came with a special ending film that runs the full credits of the voice cast and staff over new artwork.

The cast will be back together on stage soon. BLEACH FES, an anime finale celebration, is set for February 27 and 28, 2027, at the Makuhari Messe Event Hall near Tokyo, with 15 voice actors from the series on the bill, Morita and Orikasa among them.

For the voices who’ve lived with these characters since 2004, the work isn’t over. It’s just changed rooms.

Sources: ORICON NEWS interview with Masakazu Morita and Fumiko Orikasa (October 25, 2026); official report of the Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, The Calamity finale screening event, published by eeo Media (October 26, 2026); Inven Global (October 27, 2026); BLEACH official YouTube channel. Quotations from Japanese sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Images: © Tite Kubo/Shueisha, TV Tokyo, dentsu, Pierrot, via the BLEACH official YouTube channel.

Lee este artículo en español: El anime de Bleach termina tras 22 años. La voz de Ichigo dice que todavía no siente que haya acabado