I hit you, you hit me. Again, and again, and again, and again.
September 2, 2008 - A short-ish while into the series,Bleach comes to a turning point. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on your taste, but it's hard to argue that the early episodes of the series are not very different from the groove it settles into later on.
In the beginning, the story introduces a bunch of different characters, shows us around their home in Karakura Town, and lets us get to know the cast and the world around them. There's no shortage of action, but usually it has a larger purpose, bringing someone new into the story or filling in more details about a familiar character. After about a season and a half of that, though, the principal members of the cast take off for the Soul Society. There, they get in fights. A whole lot of fights. Do you have an indiscriminate fondness for fighting? Ignore this review, and buy this disc.
The eleventh volume of Bleach covers episodes 42 through 45 – which, if you're joining us after some time off, take place around the middle of the "Rescue" or "Soul Society" storyline. Ichigo Kurosaki and his merry band of pranksters have battering-rammed their way into the afterlife to rescue their captured friend Rukia Kuchiki, and they're almost to the finish line. We pick up in the aftermath of Ichigo's battle with Renji Abarai, who Ichigo finally managed to dispatch on the previous disc. If you're following along on your scorecard, that's the fight that comes in between the one with Kenpachi Zaraki and the one with Byakuya Kuchiki, just before the special attraction bout between Ishida Uryu and Mayuri Kurotsuchi.
These discs don't actually come with a scorecard, but the Soul Society arc could use one. Maybe Viz can throw that in as an extra when the box set comes out. This feels a lot less like a fully fleshed-out story and more like an old Ultimate Fighting Championship pay-per-view, with Ichigo in the role of Royce Gracie. In both cases, the suspense stems from the same simple question – can our hero win however many fights in one night? – and the answer is the same as well. (Ichigo wins simply because he's the good guy, while Royce won because his big brother booked the tournaments, but I think the analogy still holds.)
A nonstop string of fights, occasionally interrupted by training, can still make an entertaining storyline, or even an entire series. That's just about the definition of Fighting Spirit, which is one of the best sports anime in two decades. A good fight needs some rhyme and reason, though, a little bit of tactical complexity, and Bleach is frequently short of that. Tite Kubo is a fine draftsman with a very cool design sense, but he's not much when it comes to plotting out a complex, logically consistent confrontation. More often they boil down to "X is stronger than Y; X wins, Y loses." What makes X stronger than Y? Maybe he can shout louder, or something like that.
Compounding the problem, the pace of this storyline is unmercifully slow. It went by at a crawl even in the original manga, where each page took a couple of seconds to read at most – in animated form, it just drags and drags. Pacing hurts the believability of the fight scenes, too. There are dialogue breaks that last well past the point of "Why did this fight suddenly hit the pause button so someone could sit and run their mouth for half a minute?"
It's also a shame that so many of the supporting characters from earlier in the series are gone now. Folks like Tatsuki Arisawa were a lot of fun, and they disappear once the action shifts to the Soul Society. True, we meet plenty of new faces around there, but far too many of them are simply variations on the theme of "grim-faced, humorless, monochromatically-clad bastard."
The few familiar, friendly characters remaining in the spotlight do provide a little respite from all the training and fighting. Ishida and Orihime Inoue have some fun scenes together – "Orihime is a ditz with big knockers, get it?" is a long way past its sell-by date as a punch line, but in a show that's rapidly losing whatever sense of humor it used to have, you take what you can get.
Presentation and VideoThe animation on this disc isn't quite so fancy as what you might have enjoyed on the previous volume. A big chunk of the production budget probably got burned up on the Ichigo/Kenpachi slugfest, and most of the material adapted in these episodes is fairly slow and talky anyway – whatever the reason, though, there's not a lot of visual flash to enjoy. Kurotsuchi's gigantic demented-baby bankai is still a highlight, though, and the DVD transfer certainly doesn't cause problems in any case. The video is still presented in an old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio, but it looks sharp enough despite that, and the few spots of bright color stand out nicely against what are mainly dark and somber backgrounds.
Languages and Audio
As per usual, this disc comes with two audio tracks – the English dub and the original Japanese voices, both of the. presented in two-channel stereo. Both tracks are fairly "centered" as this kind of thing goes, which is too bad, because the Ishida/Kurotsuchi duel offers far more opportunities for positional effects than the show takes advantage of. Still, there's only so much to expect from a TV series that's produced on a comparatively compressed schedule, and the English dub is still as effective as ever. Terrence Stone gets a chance to really wave his freak flag in the role of Kurotsuchi, and he delivers a voice that's more than weird enough to match the character.The subtitle script, meanwhile, is much better than what we've seen in some otherShonen Jump series, like Naruto. It's not completely perfect – there are still some awkward lines here and there – but it gets across the peculiar voices of characters like Kurotsuchi.
Packaging and Extras
Like the rest of the single-disc Bleach releases, this volume has a very sharp package design, with a silver foil background to make the cover pop a bit and a cool contrasting layout on the back. Inside, there's a sheet of stickers with the cover art and some other odds and ends, while the disc itself includes the following:
-Clean ending credits
-Production art
Not a lot, in other words – and it's rather odd that it doesn't have a clean version of the opening animation as well – but it's not out of the ordinary for a single-disc release, and the art gallery has some interesting sketches of the new characters that show up on this volume.
The Bottom Line
This arc of Bleach may prove a little more effective when it's re-released in a box set with more episodes at once. Certainly Naruto works a lot better that way. As it stands, though, watching this series four episodes at a time just isn't all that satisfying. Even if you don't mind the style of the Soul Society storyline, the slow pace means you're lucky to see one complete confrontation on the entire disc, plus bits and pieces of a subplot or two, and it's not a heck of a lot of entertainment for your money.
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