YoshiKyon

7/10

I've been slowly working through Bleach for nearly a year now - I read it monthly back when it was big, but stopped at just about the same point the original anime run did - and decided to watch the movies as part of that. I know they're non-canon, mostly irrelevant, whatever, but I almost want to watch everything of shows I enjoy (and I use the term enjoy pretty loosely - anything above average is good enough).

The first three Bleach movies are a mixed bag - all are definitively Bleach, with similar strengths and weaknesses to the main series, but the first movie was a really fun watch while the second was pretty dull, and the third striking somewhere in between. So I was pretty curious to see where this would end up, and it's also pretty notably average, although far closer to the top than the bottom.

Mild spoilers below.

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Hell Verse's entire concept starts out on pretty shaky grounds - while most souls in Bleach end up in Soul Society, the bad ones go to hell, and somehow some of hell's prisoners have escaped to lure Ichigo in so that he can break their bonds and free them (and, in doing so, inevitably fuck up the entirety of Earth). I call this out immediately because I figured early on that, huh, these prisoners must have had some way of escaping, I wonder how that ties into the grand plans at the end. It doesn't. It's never explained. There's a whole thing of how the prisoners knew to go after Ichigo, but nothing on how they actually manage to do it. Cool.

There's a handful of new characters for the movie, as per usual - there's a notable lack of tension in Bleach movies for meta reasons, it's clear that nothing can happen to any of the canon cast because the movies can't touch the canon - and most of them are just generic evils, with one exception in Kokuto. He's a pretty interesting character as a whole, although very transparent in his dynamics - definitely a case where it's less interesting how he develops and more interesting to see how it's executed.

The animation is somewhat varied - there's some pretty outdated CGI on the Gates of Hell that looks really out of place regardless, while the intro fight (an edited version of one from the main series) looks incredible. That's pretty much the trend throughout - the fights look amazing, the new content looks mediocre, and anything that uses the series' assets looks mostly the same.

For the most part, though, this is typical Bleach fare: it's better than the filler in the series ever is, and it's a fun watch as a ridiculous shonen without ever doing anything outstanding. If you've got far enough in Bleach for where this is supposed to take place, then you won't expect anything more than what this offers.