User blog comment:Lemursrule/Bleach episode 271 (SERIOUSLY FANS NEED TO CALM DOWN!)/@comment-452405-20100520093617

If you can give me a link to where it says it costs $1 million per episode, even then I'll doubt it. Maybe if you consider all the people involved such as voice actors, directors and others and their pay cheques then it may seem feasable, though as for making the episode itself, any single person would be able to do the animations themselves from home given enough time.

They redo some of the scenes by giving them more detailed environments thats true, but when Hollow Ichigo swung his sword thats the exact scene used in Soul Carnival except they added an extra layer to the animation of Inoue being blown away.

But yeah I agree, even with the censoring overall the episode was fairly decent and hopefully they can keep the quality up from here on.