Review for Bleach: Series 16 Part 1 (3 Discs) (UK)

Introduction

We’re getting all penultimate for Bleach now. I’ve been counting down the releases like someone demented for over a year, and after Season 16 Part 2, that will be it. All of Bleach done and dusted! But you have to realise just how unique a thing this is for the UK market. Long running TV shows might be released here, but they almost never make it to conclusion. One reason might be that some shows, like Naruto, One Piece, and Fairy Tail are yet to conclude. But till very recently, there just weren’t the customers to sustain a long running release. Robotech was an early exception to the rule, but it wasn’t until Manga released the Dragon Ball franchise that it was proven that series spanning over 100 episodes would sell on home media in the UK. Looking at my review discs and a couple of unwise purchases, it’s a veritable graveyard of shows that fell by the wayside, some only getting as far as their first release before distributors gave up on them. As recently as this year, Manga ditched the Blu-rays for Fairy Tail, and nothing has been heard of Yu-Gi-Oh following their release of Season 2. Never ending UK anime stories also include D.Gray-Man, Initial D, Inuyasha, MAR, Sailor Moon, Voltron, and Yu Yu Hakusho. Bleach will be the first show that started its release as it was still being made in Japan, which got through to the end of its release run on DVD. Of course for Naruto we have a lot longer to go, while we’ve barely scratched the surface of One Piece’s run.


You’d think that a teenager’s life would be complicated enough if he could speak to ghosts. But that was only the beginning for Ichigo Kurosaki. When he literally bumped into a Shinigami named Rukia Kuchiki, he was introduced to a whole new world. The Shinigami’s mission is to guide forlorn spirits known as Wholes to the Soul Society, and protect them and the living from Hollows, perverted spirits that have become monsters that prey on other souls, living or dead. They are not supposed to let the living know about this supernatural world, but not only does Ichigo see Rukia, circumstances force her to give him her powers, and train him to be a Shinigami while she regains her strength. Through their adventures, Ichigo learns that his classmates Orihime and Chad are similarly bestowed with spiritual abilities. He also meets Uryu Ishida, the last Quincy, heir to a tribe of spiritual warriors from the human world that once sought out and destroyed Hollows, before the Shinigami in turn eradicated them for disrupting the balance.


When last we encountered Ichigo the after effects of his battle with Aizen had finally taken their toll, and he’d lost his Soul Reaper abilities, leading to a poignant farewell with Rukia. Now he’s just a normal human being. He can’t even see ghosts anymore the way he did before his adventures in the Soul Society began. In the 17 months since then, he’s started his final year of high school, and settled down into living a normal life, or as normal as you can get with a hard-working student who looks like a delinquent, now has a part time job with a somewhat psychotic odd-job woman, and sells his lingering physical skills from all that Soul Reaper training to whatever after school club will pay him the most.


But it would have been easier if it had all really gone away. It’s an uneasy new life to reconcile when he still knows all about the Soul Society and Hollows, where Uryu Ishida has now taken up his role in defending Karakura Town from those Hollows, where Chad and Orihime still have their powers, and where his sister Karin seems to have taken on his ability to see ghosts, and unbeknownst to him spends a fair bit of time at Uruhara’s shop. And everyone seems to be on tip-toes around him, avoiding talking about the supernatural stuff. Then odd things start to happen in Karakura. His friends are being targeted, Chad goes missing, and Ishida is hospitalised when he confronts a foe that he can’t handle. And then an odd man named Kugo Ginjo shows up, offering Ichigo a way of getting his Soul Reaper powers back. But the real question is if Ichigo actually wants to go back into that world...

12 episodes across 3 discs come in Series 16 Part 1, episodes 343-354, subtitled The Lost Agent Part 1.

Picture

Finally, finally, Kazé have proffered the transfer for Bleach that every other anime show gets as standard these days. You have a 1.78:1 anamorphic, native PAL transfer, played at the correct frame rate for UK TVs, with the requisite 4% speed-up. Gone is that profanity inducing jerkovision that marred the previous Kazé releases of Bleach, which induce a nervous twitch in my own eyes. As for the transfer, it’s not spectacular, looking to be an upscale of an NTSC source, rather than using HD masters to get the image as sharp as possible for the PAL resolution. As a result Bleach still looks soft. But, no jerking, and no blended frames. Hurrah and Huzzah!

Sound

There are some positives to be had in the audio department. The discs now have the surround flag activated, so you now have DD 2.0 Surround English and Japanese audio. It sounds exactly the same in practice however. More significant is that Kazé provide translated subtitles for the Japanese audio, and a signs only English track for the English audio. This season sees some new theme songs debuted for the series, but unlike the Madman discs, the songs don’t have subtitle translations for the lyrics. These being Kazé discs, you can’t change audio or subtitles on the fly, so Hard of Hearing English dub fans are out of luck. I’ve also noticed that the subtitles aren’t overscan friendly, with letters disappearing off the edge of the screen on my old CRT TV. But with the image finally going to native PAL, Kazé have opted to pitch correct the audio to compensate for the speed-up. Yes... wobbly music ensues...

Extras

You’ve probably already heard me whinge about Kazé discs and UPOPs, so consider it whinged again. These discs are locked up tighter than Fort Knox, and I had to guess at the run time for the episodes. I always scour these discs for new Kazé screw-ups, and this time it’s pretty obscure. While the end credits are in English, they’ve listed the French dub cast instead of the English. I double checked to be sure and the English dub is on the discs, not the French.

Kazé don’t put separate Bleach trailers on their discs, and neither do they offer a line art gallery. All you get are karaoke versions of the credit sequences, minus the credit text, but with a romanji (Japanese in English script) burnt in subtitle track that insists that you sing along. The discs have trailers for The Berserk Movie and Wolf Children.

Conclusion

I haven’t enjoyed Bleach this much since... well since the first season. I think it’s obvious by now that Bleach was never my favourite shonen property, I always thought that it overdid the po-faced seriousness of its story, overwhelmed with the story specific jargon, and drowned us in character overload. It was always about the levelling up, and epic, multi-episode spanning fights, much the same way as in Dragon Ball Z, and as a result, character and story always felt undercooked. Rukia could have been one of the best characters in the show, but following her imprisonment at the start of the Soul Society arc, any strength the character had was neutered, and her individuality and quirkiness was only rarely seen. That’s except for Season 1, when Rukia played a large part in the story, and the story itself was all about Ichigo learning that he had these new abilities, training up, and getting used to them.


Season 1 was all spent in the World of the Living, with Rukia having transferred her powers to Ichigo to keep him alive, and him now having to act as a Soul Reaper in her stead. All of a sudden he had to keep Karakura Town safe, and keep his new, second life hidden from his friends. It was a simple story, with just a handful of characters, and firmly grounded in the real world, with Ichigo balancing hunting Hollows with going to school, and hanging out with his friends. It was a whole lot of fun, and if all of Bleach had been like that, it would have been my favourite shonen property, instead of the reverse.


And now we come to the end of the anime series, the final 24-episode run, and I finally get that same feeling that I had all those years ago when I first put in a Bleach disc to discover something new. And what Kazé’s Series 16 has in common with that first season is that Ichigo is powerless once more, it’s firmly set in the World of the Living, and other than a handful of new characters, it’s really about Ichigo and his friends. We’ve come full circle with Bleach, although for my liking it’s about 15 seasons too late.


It’s not exactly the same thing though. There’s more of a reflective and downbeat feel to the story, especially at the start. It’s been 17 months since the battle with Aizen and since Ichigo lost his Soul Reaper abilities, and he’s been embracing his life as a normal teenage high school student. At least that’s the front that he presents. It quickly becomes clear that he’s at something of a loss without his powers, or rather without the responsibility that he had as a Substitute Soul Reaper, the ability to protect those that he cares about. He appears to make it through each day by lying to himself.


Speaking of lies, his friends haven’t lost their abilities, not Uryu Ishida, Orihime Inoue or Chad, indeed Ishida has taken over Ichigo’s role in dealing with the local Hollows. But they decidedly do not tell him about that part of their lives anymore. They also play the role of ‘normal’ teenagers, essentially walking on eggshells around him. It makes for some awkward friendships at the start of this season.


That changes with the arrival of those with Fullbring abilities, the same power that allows Chad to manifest his fighting strength. The five of them, led by Kugo Ginjo actually want to lose their Fullbring powers, see them as a curse from the circumstances of their births, and they need a Soul Reaper to do so. Only Ichigo is no longer a Soul Reaper, so Ginjo has a plan to restore Ichigo’s abilities by teaching him Fullbring. Ichigo is reluctant to do this at first, having left that life behind, but there’s another Fullbring user in town, Tsukishima, the former leader of Ginjo’s group, but who has something darker planned. That begins when Ichigo’s friends start being targeted, followed, and then in Uryu’s case, attacked. And so it is that Ichigo starts his Fullbring training, essentially re-entering the supernatural world from square one. But as clearly as Tsukishima is untrustworthy and malevolent, the seeds of mistrust and doubt that Ginjo starts sowing with Ichigo, especially regarding the Soul Reapers and even Ichigo’s father, it becomes apparent that Ginjo has an agenda too.


At this point Bleach is a nice, small scale story again, with an emphasis on character and narrative, keeping the action sharp and exciting without distorting the pace, and without the nuclear explosions of fighting energy that the characters had got used to by the end of the Arrancar arc. It’s rooted in the real world, which makes it a story that I can relate to again. It’s too late for me at this point, but Bleach is going out on a note that I can appreciate. Hopefully the final part will keep the quality up.