Seriously, it's hard to manage maintaining that sort of "visual shepard tone" of a constantly building crescendo when it comes to animation that just feels like it keeps 1-upping itself week after week, but it's really has been delivering on making every episode feel like it's been worth the anticipation. I've also gotta say that there's something about the format of how the episodes all break and end with those quotes that's made each one have a sort of... "completeness" feeling to them like reading a chapter of a manga that's really different from how you feel about most episodically released animation.
Most of the time with anime (little bits of filler/padding for TV timing notwithstanding) it feels like you could just seamlessly string together all of the animation into one long continuous film when it was all done. It's like shows that are designed to be binge-watched and skip through the intro to just flow one episode directly into the next... but
Bleach: The Thousand Year Blood War isn't like that.
It reminds me of how
Chainsaw Man had unique endings every episode and it was one of the other series that's managed to give a similar sort of anticipation of one-upping each previous episode and making each one feel like it's own complete chapter.
Bleach: TTYBW has really leaned into that with the episode titles, the closing quotes, and even the halfway mark of the episodes having a REALLY distinct and overt feel that oddly it also reminds me of how
Asura's Wrath mimicked the mid-episode commercial breaks of anime and had en episodic segmentation that was overtly intentional.
I think that this somehow manages to make the moments of the animation feel like they have more of their own space to shine, but also because it provides more ways for the team to segment that animation into blocks where you can probably tackle the work in a way that allows a bit more space, since you have a dedicated amount of runtime that's designated to breaks and slower-paced teases. Essentially it feels like it's set up so that you get a consistent rhythm to the flow for every episode, so that they ALWAYS know when and where to lean in and put in the extra effort to make the episode shine.
Additionally, because they always build back to a consistent conclusion it FEELS more satisfying because there's that structural consistency and time where you know it's going to hint or tease at something where that playing with anticipation is a part of the experience, it doesn't have any of that,
"Next time on Dragon Ball Z!" sales-pitch-type feel or the fourth wall-breaking character telling you about the upcoming episode feel, which breaks the structure in a way that's not aligned with the narrative structure. An early pseudo version of that would probably be how
Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex used the Tachikomatic Days post-episode shorts to tell a story that was happening concurrently and eventually intertwined into the narrative, but even that leaned in on the sort of meta narrative approach being a bit more overtly disconnected.
THIS really delivers the "this episode is over" cliffhangers in a way where the release feels like its own part of the storytelling that I really dig, and I think it's also subconsciously a reason why the animation always feels like it's delivering something even better each episode.
X