It feels wrong to say I enjoyed this, especially after some other anime had awful live action movies made (I'm especially thinking of you, Attack on Titan...)

But I liked this. I loved (most of) the series - and this kept much of the spirit, and some of the story line (as much as a movie can of 366 episodes).

The CGI and the fight scenes were suprisingly good for this type of movie. I watched the Japanese soundtrack, so avoided the extra layer of simplification that comes with many movies that are transalated to English. Some of the set was awesome - of particular note being the Urahara's Store set within Karakura Town.

My biggest complaint of it all is the casting. Some of the characters were, in my opinion, just wrong. I don't mean bad actors, but the wrong age group, not rugged enough, not prideful enough. But kudos to Ichigo's dad - I loved this interpretation much more than the series (and his sisters were really well cast).

From a purely selfish perspective, I would have liked [spoiler] to have seen someone show their bankai (but I did like the interpretation of Zabimaru), or some of the other Captains. On the other side, at least it didn' show Kon[/spoiler].

At the end of the day though, films like this tread a fine line between confusing people not familiar with the material, and upsetting those who are familiar. The Death Note movies did a little of both of these, but overall left a feeling of disappointment. Bleach, I think, did better than most, and I'd love to see a SQL.