Bleach

Anime, anime, anime. Why are you so appealing? With your exciting action and bright colours you draw us in. Then someone thinks about making the animation into a live-action film/series, because, y’know, people would like that. Well, Netflix is that person today and Tite Kubo’s Bleach is the anime that has been exposed to the process of livification*.

[*Livification is a new word meaning the adaptation of a comic or animated film/series into a live action piece.]

Now, Netflix hasn’t got the best track record for the livification (there’s that word again. It’s going to be a thing. Honest!) of anime. Last years Death Note for example lost pretty much everything that made the original (and the subsequent Japanese-made live-action film) so enthralling. And we go on: Avatar: The Last Airbender has an adaptation forthcoming on Netflix in 2020 because the previous effort at livification (look, there it is!) didn’t really happen. Full Metal Alchemist appeared on Netflix recently to mixed reviews. And there are more, to name a few recent efforts: Ajin, Attack on Titan, Ghost in the Shell, Tokyo Ghoul and Assassination Classroom. As you can see there are some that are better received than others but they still lag behind the effect and reviews of the original source anime.

For Bleach though, the tone is much better than last years Ghost in the Shell. Director Shinsuke Sato has done a great job adapting this anime, and he has previous form in this world with the livification (yeah, i know. I know) of Gantz and Death Note: Light Up the New World. This version of Bleach embraces the more light-hearted nature alongside the pure mental joy of the anime world. Managing to do a decent job of incorporating the iconic imagery along with the classic anime action and sensibilities, with a touch of modernisation, it all really worked for me. The creature design was pretty good and the CGI was high quality. I would have liked a bit more of the action sequences and the ones that are there could have been more intricate but overall this is a decent effort at an anime livification (One more for the road).