Review for Bleach: Series 12 Part 3 (2 Discs) (UK)

Introduction

Yup, more Bleach. Intro done...

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.


If you’ve been watching Bleach up till now, you’ll now that the Zanpakuto refer to the Soul Reapers’ swords. No ordinary blades, these are almost sentient entities which exhibit great power, unleashing special moves on their targets with extreme prejudice, not least of which are the Bankai power ups. To master one’s Zanpakuto, a Soul Reaper has to come to terms with the sword’s spirit, learn its name and in the process form a partnership with the sword. At least that’s the way that it has been up to now. In Zanpakuto: The Alternate Tale, all of that tradition is turned on its head when an enigmatic figure named Muramasa decides to free the swords from slavery, separate the sword spirits from the Soul Reapers. Now all of a sudden, the sword spirits have become manifest, able to wield their special powers by themselves, and have begun taking over the Soul Society. The Soul Reapers, suddenly armed with plain old steel swords are left on the back foot, vulnerable to attack. Rukia just about manages to make it back to the Living World, pursued by her own sword spirit Sodenoshirayuki, but in truth she’s just bait to lure Ichigo back to the Soul Society. Soon Ichigo has to face his own sword, Zangetsu in battle. But the truth behind Muramasa’s plot is far more insidious and personal, and at the end of the last collection, his plans failed in the worst possible way. As we start this collection, Karakura City faces the fallout of Muramasa’s miscalculation.


The concluding two episodes of this arc, plus ten more episodes with which to procrastinate before getting back to the main storyline, are presented across two discs by Kazé Entertainment, distributed for them in the UK by Manga Entertainment. The episodes comprise 254-265, if you’re keeping count.

Picture

Bleach has now gone widescreen. It’s now in the modern TV friendly aspect ratio of 1.78:1 anamorphic. And that’s the end of the good news. The last few releases of Bleach via Madman Entertainment had native PAL transfers, 25 frames per second with 4% PAL speedup, but of high resolution and free of any standards conversion artefacts. Not anymore. With Kazé’s release of Bleach, we’re back to the bad old days of NTSC-PAL standards conversions. It’s worse in my opinion, as my limited experience of Kazé output has shown that while their Blu-rays are sweet, and their PAL DVDs are acceptable, their NTSC-PAL conversions leave a lot to be desired, and are the least impressive of any distributor that I have reviewed.


Incidentally Bleach’s 1.78:1 anamorphic image is now one of those few NTSC-PAL conversions that convert by simply repeating every 24th frame to create the 25th PAL frame. That explains the rhythmic judder in pans and scrolls, exactly once a second. On the bright side this means that the ghosting and blended frames that afflicted the earlier Kazé Bleach releases is gone, but the judder is annoying, and the image quality still looks of such low resolution that you’d still think it was a standards conversion.

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.

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.

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. Disc 1 autoplays with trailers for the Bleach Hellverse movie and Bakuman, while disc 2 has a Penguindrum trailer instead of Bakuman.

Most episodes end with the Illustrated Guide to Soul Reapers Golden comedy sketches.

Conclusion

When the previous collection of episodes concluded, I had a brief whinge at how the really interesting villain had left the stage, and I doubted that the story could sustain for another twelve episodes on the back of Muramasa and his grudge alone. I was right. The actual Alternate Zanpakuto arc proper lasts just another two episodes before coming to its conclusion, and the next episode preview jokingly mentions that there will be an extra delay before the main storyline resumes. That is another ten episodes to fill, and Bleach fills it with mostly single episode stories, little character interludes and explorations, varying from the comic to the dramatic.


I’m perverse when it comes to Bleach. The main storyline has long since left me cold. The filler arcs when they begin offer a pleasant diversion to start with, but if they last too long, they too can fall into the repetitive ‘my sword’s bigger than your sword’ shonen nonsense that puts me off the main storyline. Incidentally, much of the second half of the Alternate Zanpakuto tale was of that bent. But when it comes to those single episode stories of Bleach, you can count me in. These short, sharp bursts of character have small stories to tell, but they do so with style, grace and with entertainment, and at no point do they outstay their welcomes. Even if you don’t happen to like a certain episode, you only have to wait twenty minutes and you can try again with a different story, focusing on different characters.


It’s actually a pretty neat development. The Zanpakuto arc was all about this fiendish plan to get the Soul Reapers’ swords to manifest as actual characters, and have them rebel against their masters. At the end of the arc, the threat was defeated, and the Zanpakuto restored to the Shinigami’s sides. But the subsequent ten episodes show that all isn’t resolved just yet, as the swords’ personalities are still manifest in the real world. The story develops that those Shinigami that died in the recent insurrection left their Zanpakuto running free, and without their masters those swords are becoming a blight on the Soul Society, and the living world. They’ve become Sword Beasts, and need to be hunted down. Meanwhile the Soul Reapers’ Zanpakuto get to help the Shinigami in accomplishing this, and we get to see more stories as they interact with their particular Soul Reapers, lay to bed some lingering grudges, and generally have the odd adventure.


Ichigo has a particularly tough time in one episode where a Sword Beast joins with a Hollow to create something new and deadlier. Renji’s Zanpakuto Zabimaru manifests as two characters, Snake and Monkey, and the two provide a whole lot of comic relief with their bickering antics. Snake gets tired of hanging around with the other two, only to run off and meet Ichigo’s kid sister Karin, spending a day just being kid. Hisagi starts off his episode where he left off in the main arc, in a state of utter hate for his Zanpakuto Kazeshini, a sentiment that is reciprocated. Kazeshini is like Kato from Pink Panther, in that he attacks Hisagi at every opportunity, but after one battle where he’s left literally holding a baby, his outlook begins to change.


There’s a touch of romance too, when Rangiku and Haineko are hunting Sword Beasts, only Haineko finds a really cute one. I’ve seen this story done before in Saiyuki Reload, but this Bleach reiteration actually does it better. There’s more comedy when Snake and Monkey return on a mission to the Department of Research and Development, only this time with Byakuya’s sword Senbonzakura, only his capricious nature is even more than the two rabble-rousers can handle. There’s more besides, but these short sharp hits of Bleach action, character focused, light-hearted and entertaining are what I like best about the show. They may not be ‘canon’ material, they may just be filler, keeping things ticking over until there’s enough new manga story to adapt, but I like them. They also give a better ending to the Zanpakuto arc than the actual arc itself, as there is emotional closure to the characters, and a sense of melancholy as the swords finally return to their inert, bladed forms. I’m going to miss the manifest Zanpakuto, as I actually liked some of them more than their Shinigami! If they can spin off a Soul Eater Not! anime and a Rock Lee anime, surely they can spin off a Zanpakuto anime.


Just when Bleach is on the verge of losing my interest, it delivers a hit of entertainment that gets me enjoying it again. I don’t expect that to last. We’re back to the main storyline with the next instalment, although Ichigo and Ulquiorra have been poised for battle for so long, they’ve probably developed hernias by now. Kazé’s presentation of this series is just as incompetent as ever, else I would mark it higher.