Thank you, - Urahara - - this is very good news! Maybe the release of the Bleach novels helped to generate more interest. Also, the Blu Ray remastered boxes are hopefully selling well. I am buying the German versions which are combined with the original Japanese. They also appeared in Amazon.jp.
Yeah maybe. I'm happy it beat series like Fairy Tail even though that one had an anime until a month ago. This makes me believe Bleach has always been at least in the top 10 after the anime ended. The list we always get only shows the top 5. I think Bleach has always been a franchise with a lot of sales after the anime ended. Mainly thanks to overseas fans.
We already got the remastered boxes and at least to me, they do the trick. The result is beautiful and most of the flaws are gone. They are a few left but it is nothing that spoils my enjoyment. I would prefer it if the Bleach anime will actually continue where it stopped with some key scenes as extended flashbacks.
That goes for the material we got until now. Earlier this week I skimmed through the anime a little bit. I think the animation is fine most of the time. Added filler fighting sequences tend to have bad animation, but overall the only the only fight that annoyed in terms of animation was the first half of Nnoitra vs Kenpachi.
The big problem however like the others pointed out is the pacing. From the Hueco Mundo arc and onwards every episode has 5 minutes of recap. The rest of the episodes are just dragged out scenes that cover little manga material. They extend certain scenes(sometimes good, most of the time bad). Like for example in the manga Ichigo tried to protect Nelliel from Nnoitra, but he got kicked away. After that Nnoitra tortured him and Nel transformed. In the anime Nnoitra kicked him away like five times, with some badly animated sequences inbetween. It was basically Ichigo screaming ''I'll protect her'' 10 times and Orihime saying ''Kurosaki-kun'' everytime he got hurt . Something that should've been 2 minutes, took half of the episode. The Tesla torture scene also falls under this category. This basically happens every episode slowing down the progression of the story
They also added a lot of bad comedy scenes inbetween. The Pesche and Dodonchakka jokes were way too overused in the anime. Fights also dragged on too much with lot of still moments with pointless filler dialogues or fighting scenes. The 3-way fights between Kenpachi/Byakuya/Mayuri and the Espadas took 7 episodes. That's wayyy too much and could make them boring to the viewer. In contrary to the manga, the anime would jump from one fight to another making it annoying. One episode on each fight would be sufficient and make up for some epic individual episodes. Same goes for the first fights in the Hueco Mundo arc (Ichigo/Chad/Rukia/Uryuu vs privaron and Espada 9). The last 6 episodes of the FB arc are the perfect example of how the anime should handle many fights after each other or at once.
Fake Karakura Town arc was also dragged. Each fight took at least 1 episode, even the less interesting ones like the VC battles.
The whole Arrancar saga in the anime was like 110 episodes, while it should've been 80. New viewers would get bored with the arc because not much happens over the course of 10 episodes. It's a shame because the Arrancar saga is a good arc
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Long story short: Animation at canon moments is fine, pacing is horrible. A Bleach Kai treatment removing all bad filler and increasing the pacing, with some polished art would be sufficient. However Dragon Ball Kai wasn't a big succes because people don't like to watch old anime aired on TV in Japan. Continuing the series where it left would mean the return of some of the old fanbase with some new fans. Making a new series could make Bleach as popular again as it was in its prime. Good examples of these are the reboot adaptions of HxH and JoJo.
