Review for Bleach: Series 14 Part 1 (2 Discs) (UK)

Introduction

Five more collections of Bleach after this until the end of the series! Five more collections until I’m free of my own personal torture. It wouldn’t be so bad if this show was relentlessly awful. But it’s just about good enough to stick with. The ridiculously extended fight sequences (complete with observer commentary, flashbacks and recaps) still manage to serve up a vicarious thrill when one of the heroes triumph. There’s just enough going on in the painfully slow paced story to keep you interested. And there’s always that lingering hope that it might just get brilliant, even now. There’s also that idiotic belief that after having made it this far, it would be a shame to stop now. After all, you wouldn’t run 26 miles of a marathon only to get a taxi for the last 365 yards, would you?


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.


So where were we? Ichigo and his friends went to Hueco Mundo, the Hispanic land of the Hollows to rescue Orihime, who’d been kidnapped by the Soul Society traitor Aizen. He’s been turning Hollows into human looking Arrancars armed with Zanpakutos of their own. Ichigo has been training to become a Visored, which is like coming at an Arrancar from the other direction. Aizen’s plan becomes clear, he wants to take over the Soul Society, but to do that he has to attack Ichigo’s hometown first in the world of the living. At the end of the previous volume, after delivering a kicking to a major section of the Shinigami, he unveiled his plan, and left Ichigo and his friends trapped in Hueco Mundo to attack Karakura town. To forestall Aizen’s plan, the Shinigami came up with a plan of their own, setting up a mechanism to transfer the real Karakura Town to the Soul Society, and creating a fake town in which to engage Aizen and his minions in battle. But Aizen’s ready for this, as he and his Arrancars face the top Captains of the Soul Society.


In the last collection, Ulquiorra got defeated by Ichigo, finally... Orihime was rescued, but there’s no point bringing her back when Aizen was running rampant in the Living World. In fact, he’s such a villainous dick, that as well as ponderous speechifying, he’s got into the habit of killing his own men once they lose, just to stave off the boredom. As we begin this collection, he’s just wiped out Stevie Wonder Bug Boy, when Ichigo comes bursting back, ready to kick villainous dick arse. It ain’t gonna be that easy.

12 episodes across 2 discs await in Series 14 Part 1, episodes 292-303, subtitled The Downfall of the Arrancars 2. I thought they fell down in the last release. We’re back to a reasonable disc count and RRP too.

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. Actually in this collection the textless ending is actually textless, no karaoke subs at all. Don’t kid yourself that this is a sudden attack of common sense from Kazé. I bet that they just couldn’t get the rights for the song lyrics. Both discs autoplay with trailers for Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan, and Bleach the Movie 4: Hellverse.

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

Conclusion

Bleach almost does it again. It almost gets me interested in the show. There are points in this collection of episodes where I’m genuinely thrilled by the action unfolding on the screen, invested in the characters, and surprised and enchanted by some of the developments in the plot, not least where Ichigo finally learns what it seems everyone else already knew about his dad. But by God does this show make you sweat blood for that vicarious moment of indulgence!


For one thing, in Aizen, they’ve actually made a villain who is too evil. Forget him killing his own minions when they aren’t performing up to his standards of villainy. He’s just so in love with the sound of his own voice! He loves to pontificate, and the animators love it when he pontificates, as while he’s setting forth on his latest grand theory of why he’s so great, and why everyone else is pathetic, they don’t actually have to animate that much. But there comes a point where you get tired of waiting for Ichigo to kick his arse (and that is what it will boil down to), and you know that if you could, you’d reach into the television screen, like the hand of God, and wring his self-righteous neck yourself. Aizen! Why don’t you just hurry up and die already!


Of course that isn’t going to happen anytime soon with the way these episodes are structured, full of recaps, previews, flashbacks, and the like, all to pad out that five minutes or so of actual, genuine new content per episode. This collection sees a new 30-second trick in the padders’ arsenal. Each episode now begins with a quick preview of what is coming up in the episode that you are in the process of watching. What’s more, there are some extensive recaps in this collection that take us all the way back to the start of the series, Season 1, and the Soul Society arc, which has the added effect of reminding just how much better Bleach used to be. It made me want to eject this disc and watch the opening seasons again instead.


Despite all this, I once again let my guard down and get interested in Bleach once more. For Aizen is close to becoming a verbose god, and with all of the Soul Reapers and Visoreds beaten, there’s just Ichigo left, who with the aid of Gin is in the middle of a crisis of confidence. Which is when Ichigo’s dad, Uruhara, and Yoruichi join the fight. It’s all poised for a big switch in direction, along with a whole heap of revelations and conversations between father and son. And Bleach stops it all for a couple of filler episodes. Suddenly, everyone in the Soul Society is making a movie for an episode. Then episode 299 shows up, in the middle of another story altogether, with Rukia back in the World of the Living, in the middle of investigating the disappearances of some Soul Reapers. I had a WTF moment, and hastened to my computer to Google in a panic. It turns out that episode 299 is a prequel to the fourth Bleach movie, Hellverse.


My interest had waned, my excitement about Bleach had cooled, and it took me the better part of the next two episodes to get enthused about the arc once more, which had resumed with Aizen triumphing again, getting tired of Ichigo and ignoring him to head back to the Soul Society to do the whole being a god thing over there, and laying waste to the real Karakura town. Once more I had worked myself up into a vague enthusiasm for the show, just a little bit of that thrill that comes when you can sense a long running arc finally spiralling towards conclusion... And then episode 303 happens, the final one in this collection. My notes for it are, “Happy New f***ing Year”. The ultimate frustration of another filler episode denying me my vicarious release of pent up hate that can only be resolved when the epic toe-rag Aizen gets his just desserts.


Believe it or not this is the good stuff in Bleach, what every Bleach fan has been waiting for. When Naruto Shippuden got to a similar point in its narrative, I was effusive in my appreciation, throwing out 8s and 9s willy-nilly. Now that Bleach is in a similar position, I can barely muster a 5 out of 10.