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.