Started Out Good But Then Went Down the Hill

Written by RenjiWu09 on August 13, 2010 at 11:03 AM

As far as I can go with my memories of anime, Bleach and Naruto has to be in there. (I am not comparing the both because it would be pointless to do so and that defeats the purpose of this review. ) At that time, everyone who first started to watch anime would be watching one or the other or both. In the beginning, I did feel that Bleach was interesting. I give props to do that because it's what gave rise to Bleach today. However Bleach today makes me disappointed. It got me so disappointed that I stopped watching entirely and just checked up on the manga once every two weeks or so.

Bleach has already morphed into the process of DBZ in which one chapter takes up several episodes to animate. Really slow dialogue I have to say. Show the closeup to each character's face. Zoom out to the background. Then zoom in at only the character's eye and then speak very slowly. This is why you start furiously clicking your media player to fast forward and skip over lengthy dialogue.

Over the years, the animators for Bleach have gotten lazy. At certain arcs of Bleach, they seem to change animators because Ichigo looks so different in each episode which drives me insane. If you intend to animate, you should draw each character as closely as possible to the original character design by Kubo Tite. One person commented that the animators made Grimmjow look like Toushirou and Ichigo's mask like a Lego block. I don't know what to say.

The first arc in Bleach was acceptable. Shounen but acceptable. You save your best friend so you gather more of your friends and enter Seiretei. Excluding fillers, the second arc is where complaints rise. Why is there another damsel in distress character? Not only that, this damsel in distress is very, no, extremely useless to everyone. Man, Kubo-sensei, you didn't have to make girls the weakest characters. And c'mon, Ichigo's almost through high school. Yet he seems to act like a kid at times. I expected more character development since so many events has happened.

Kubo's art deserves to be revered. I think getting your hands on the Bleach artbook is worth it because his concepts of design are very interesting. To every artist out there, I'm sure half of you would agree. The anime, nahh. It doesn't seem to catch up with Kubo's thoughts. It's too far away.