In the midst of the success of FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST (which was just uploaded onto Netflix a few days ago) and ATTACK ON TITAN live-action adaptations, it’s no surprise that a BLEACH adaptation isn’t far behind.
A summary of the premise of the BLEACH TV series:
“High school student Kurosaki Ichigo is unlike any ordinary kid. Why? Because he can see ghosts. Ever since a young age, he's been able to see spirits from the afterlife. Ichigo's life completely changes one day when he and his two sisters are attacked by an evil, hungry and tormented spirit known as a Hollow. Right in the nick of time, Ichigo and his siblings are aided by a Shinigami (Death God) named Kuchiki Rukia, whose responsibility it is to send good spirits (Pluses) to the afterlife known as Soul Society, and to purify Hollows and send them up to Soul Society. But during the fight against the Hollow, Rukia is injured and must transfer her powers to Ichigo. With this newly acquired power, so begins Kurosaki Ichigo's training and duty as a Shinigami to maintain the balance between the world of the living and the world of the dead…”
I’m not such a huge fan of animes with filler. There is a problem with basing an anime off of an on-going manga, they don’t produce them fast enough. So what to do with these animes waiting on the manga to provide more story? These animes can go one of three ways: follow along with the manga until there isn’t anymore and go off in its own direction (which is is why some anime follows manga perfectly and then completely deviates from it), have huge gaps in the release of episodes because they wait on more of the manga it is based on to be produced, and last, add filler. Because an anime is caught up with manga, and the writers don’t want to (or are told not to) deviate too much from the original manga while waiting for more of it to be produced, they instead makeup stories in between and stretch the fuck out of flashbacks and dialogue to waste as much time as possible to fill in the gaps, so they can still regularly release new episodes of the anime. I’ve seen this go as far as EIGHTY consecutive episodes filler in NARUTO. You could think of anime filler like a “Clip Show” episode on steroids. You don’t come across too many animes that have waited for popular manga to have completely finished before producing a show.
How many DBZ characters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One, but it’ll take five episodes. This is funny to anime fans because the pain is all too real.
So yeah, BLEACH is an anime with oodles of filler. According to animefillerlist.com (this site exists because this is so common) BLEACH has a total of 366 episodes, with 166 episodes of filler. That’s a 45% filler percentage, holy shit. So, the point I’m making with this rant about filler is that a movie adaptation could actually do the story good in regard to the anime. (The manga is usually better.) Let’s check out that trailer!
The new BLEACH live-action adaptation is coming out in Japan this Summer, July 20th. A worldwide Netflix release is likely to follow soon after. We’ll keep you folks updated!
Your friendly neighborhood reformed weeaboo,
~Big Eyes
