Two things stand out from this series:
1. Japanese Hip-hop music is a good way to make ancient spirit battling contemporary
2. You really don’t want to have anything to do with the spirit world in Japan – there’s no casper the friendly ghost in the world of Japanese grotesqueries.

To read from the promotional material:

Bleach follows the lives of Ichigo Kurosaki, who is a high school student with the ability to see ghosts, and a shinigami (Soul Reaper or, literally, “death god”) named Rukia Kuchiki, who crosses paths with Ichigo while hunting an evil spirit known as a hollow. Rukia is wounded during the ensuing confrontation with the spirit and is left with no choice but to transfer her powers into Ichigo. Thus the adventures of Ichigo and Rukia begin. Together they search for hollows and perform soul burials on wayward souls, cleansing the spirits and sending them to Soul Society. The early parts of the story focus mainly on the characters and their pasts, rather than the actual occupation of the shinigami. As events unfold, the story begins to delve deeper into the world of these gods of death on the “other side” called Soul Society.

Bleach is a welcome addition to the gener of supernatural action, the evil spirits – Hollows – are suitably menacing and mysterious, seemingly driven by an overwhelming need to consume all lost soles and spiritual energy around them. Maybe we could read into the hollows desire for perpetual, meaningless consumption a subtle critique of consumer society or addiction – certainly there are destructive extremes to these problems.

The series has a typical infusion of that distinctive anime aesthetics where stylised action and violence sits alongside cute girls, a scene of tradgedy cuts to humour and high-school hijinks. Is Kusaki gong to date Rukia (the Soul Reaper instructing him)? Will Ichigo be able to battle the Hollows? The chain the links recently departed to their corpses.

An interesting aside was the main character Ichigo Kurosaki actually referring to his orange hair – yes, it turns out this was not a simple stylistic choice of the animators to designate him a fiery tempered youthful character, but he was born that way and suffered much bullying as a kid. So there you go – even in the world of anime there are occasions where different coloured hair is not a stylistic convention but a freakish twist of nature that makes you stand out.

Respect. It’s important for both Samurai and Hip Hop artists. And Afro Samurai shows respect from Japan towards HipHop and blaxploitation cinema and from the US towards anime and chambara cinema. This is not wrongheaded appropriation of the Last Samurai. While we could complain about what they get wrong (eg: a failure to show the internal divisions and contradictions within samurai communities), it’s better to see what they deem essential to get right.

In Afro we can see no chivalrous Samurai representations – only murderous or duty bound. Likewise, the HipHop is not about race politics but does speek to oppression through the drive for revenge. This is not simply Japanese or American. It’s hybrid with two parents: Chambara and hiphop.

Chambara:
There are a number of themes that occur in Samurai film plots. Afro deals with the roaming masterless samurai, and tales of clan loyalty and conflict. As with most chambara films, the main character is struggling with a conflict between giri (sense of duty) and ninjo (human feelings). Afro is trained in bushido (way of the warrior) but is haunted by moments of sympathy and loss (which comes in the form of his memories of childhood and love of a woman). And according to the conventions of a good chambara film, it ends with bloodshed and a duel between our anti-hero and an equal opponent. The chambara conventions are given a new twist through the use of technological gadgets (mobile phones) and the hi-tech cyborg opponents Afro faces, pushing this towards a techno-chambara fantasy. One that is furthered by the use of hip-hop and celebrity.

Hip-hop and African-American culture:
The American influences upon Afro, such as the use of hiphop and the branding of it around Samuel L Jackson ground this as an experiment showing us the intersecting forces that produce global anime.

Results:
The mixed heritage of this anime can offer a deepening appreciation of global anime and techno-chambara (with an American hip-hop beat). In a sign of things to come, the balance Afro tries to strike between chambara (Japan) and hip-hop (US) shows that US and Japanese pop culture will not replace or consume each other, but that both may grow in popularity together.