Review for Naruto Shippuden: Box Set 26 (2 Discs)

Introduction

The last few volumes of Naruto have been a bit of a pain to review. I want to get a handle on the Ninja War arc, to really get into how it unfolds, the juice of the narrative, but the problem is inconsistency. This is an arc which up till now has been interleaved with oodles of filler, and unlike the ridiculous filler of earlier Naruto, this has been written in a way to fit into the war. It has the effect of really padding it out. Add to that problems with Manga’s check discs and releases (I had a set of DVD-Rs for one volume, and Collection 25 turned up in dub only screener form), and I just haven’t been able to get into the current Naruto Shippuden story arc. Collection 26 should be where it all pans out though, as for this collection of 13 episodes, there is no filler whatsoever. This is the pure, uncut, ninja drug. Now I’ll get to see if I do actually like this arc. But what’s Naruto without a little inconsistency? From this volume, the DVDs will be in NTSC format!


15 years previously, the Hidden Leaf village was plagued by the Nine-Tailed fox demon. The Fourth Hokage ninja sacrificed his life to defeat the menace, and sealed up the spirit in the body of a newborn child. That orphan grew up as Naruto Uzumaki, a mischievous prankster with great ambition. He wants to be the strongest ninja of them all and be granted the title Hokage, leader of the Hidden Leaf village. In the first Naruto series, we followed him on his training as a ninja, tutored by Kakashi, and partnered with his ideal girl Sakura, and his archrival Sasuke. Of course Sakura was sweet on Sasuke, which didn’t help, but slowly the three became firm friends.


The dark clouds of ambition tore that friendship apart though, but it wasn’t Naruto’s ambition. It was Sasuke’s, sole survivor of the Uchiha clan, slaughtered by his brother Itachi. He grew up wanting revenge on Itachi, and wanting to gain in power and strength as quickly as possible. Sasuke gave into the temptation for easy power, offered by the renegade ninja Orochimaru, when Orochimaru infiltrated the village during the Chunin exams, and assassinated the Third Hokage. Sasuke left to join Orochimaru, and Naruto swore to get him back. For the last two and half years, Naruto has been in training with the sage Jiraiya, and he’s now returned to the village, empowered and ready to rescue his friend. But Orochimaru and Sasuke haven’t been resting easy either, while the Akatsuki group of renegade ninja have been accelerating their plans, and top of the list is obtaining the Nine-Tailed Fox Demon, the one that is currently sealed up in Naruto.


And as we rejoin Naruto Shippuden the war still continues, indeed intensifies with Kabuto bringing forth the resurrected Madara Uchiha into battle. That of course begs the question, just who is the masked figure calling himself Madara? As the five Kage of the Ninja villages step forth into battle, Bee and Naruto face a harder challenge, the other tailed-beasts, resurrected and now under control of the fake-Madara. 13 more episodes of Naruto Shippuden are presented across 2 discs from Manga Entertainment.


Disc 1
323. The Five Kage Assemble
324. The Unbreakable Mask and the Shattered Bubble
235. Jinchuriki vs. Jinchuriki!
326. Four-Tails, the King of Sage Monkeys!
327. Nine-Tails
328. Kurama
329. Two-Man Team

Disc 2
330. Promise of Victory
331. Eyes That See in the Dark
332. A Will of Stone
333. The Risks of the Reanimation Jutsu
334. Sibling Tag-Team
335. To Each Their Own Leaf

Picture

Naruto Shippuden is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen in progressively encoded NTSC from now on; no more PAL speed-up. The image is clear and sharp, and the progressive playback allows for smooth animation. Shippuden’s animation and its character designs are sharper and crisper than those in the first Naruto series. It’s certainly more detailed while the colours are a little more muted. The story comes across well, and the action sequences are impressively animated, while conforming to a long running anime budget.

Sound

The DD 2.0 English and Japanese stereo is more than adequate in recreating the original experience, and given a little Prologic magic does offer a pleasant ambience and some discrete action. Yasuhara Takanashi takes over the music reins from Toshiro Masuda, and the result is if anything even less memorable than the music from the first series. But it works well enough in driving the action, and it doesn’t get overbearing. Once again, I only sampled the English dub and found it acceptable if unspectacular. It certainly isn’t the worst I have heard, but some of the actors don’t seem particularly suited to the characters. From this volume the subtitle font changes from larger yellow to quite small white (it helps if you watch this on a larger TV). The volume levels are a little lower than before, but the theme songs are subtitled now.

Extras

The extras haven’t changed, the same static menus, with 5 Storyboard images, 5 Production Art images and the trailers for Naruto Shippuden and the first Shippuden movie all on Disc 2.

Conclusion

This is as good as Naruto Shippuden will get right now. It’s the pure stuff, the manga brought to life with no filler, no egregious flashbacks, and no lengthy recaps. It’s not that great though, certainly not as good as the Naruto of old at its best, and not even as good as the first couple hundred Shippuden episodes. The first problem is the war arc of course. It’s so epic, so large scale that the story becomes impersonal; it’s harder to grasp the stakes that the characters face, and there’s also so much going on that it’s hard to keep track of it all. Even a fan favourite and major character like Sakura, gets barely three minutes of screen time in this collection of episodes.


The second problem is a more fundamental one, regarding the way the story is structured and paced. Naruto Shippuden is a story that thrives on delayed gratification. This is a show that will show some intense action, and then cut away to a quieter, possibly trivial scene. This isn’t unheard of, after all most action story pacing is about highs and lows, about balancing the adrenaline rush of action with quieter, character moments that bring you down, set you up for the next thrill ride. Only in Naruto, these aren’t blessed moments of relief from the intensity, they’re more like roadblocks stopping you from getting the resolution you desire.


There are three ‘Hell Yeah!’ moments in this collection of episodes. The previous collection saw the reanimation of Madara Uchiha (leaving the question of who the other Madara is hanging). The first ‘Hell Yeah!’ comes when the Allied Shinobi put together the sole force capable of facing the legendary ninja. The five leaders, the Kage join forces and head to the battlefield. There are some good moments in this battle, not least of which is the fifth Hokage Tsunade unleashing her brand of ninjutsu, but there is no resolution to this battle, and we always seem to cut away to another battlefield when the action gets good.


The second ‘Hell Yeah!’ comes when Naruto and Bee encounter the other Madara, the mastermind behind this plot. Only the Jinchuriki have been deemed strong enough to face him, only it turns out that Madara has the other Jinchuriki, reanimated by Kabuto at his command, and on top of that he’s reinstalled the Tailed-Beasts. So we have the 9-Tailed Fox, the 8-Tailed ‘Oxtopus’, versus the other Tailed-Beasts, and the action gets thermonuclear in scale. We have Bleach style mountains being destroyed. But in the middle of all this, we get a whole lot of new information and back story about the tailed beasts, and Naruto’s relationship with his own inner demon takes a new turn. And again it seems we always cut away during the good bits.


The final ‘Hell Yeah!’ is the return of Sasuke, who we haven’t seen in a while, but whose return has been teased during the first half of this collection. He runs into his brother, the reanimated Itachi, who free of Kabuto’s control has been hunting Orochimaru’s apprentice down to put an end to his schemes. So we get a fair bit of brother to brother interaction, Sasuke finally getting some answers from his older brother in death, which he never got in life. And when they finally find Kabuto they see that he’s levelled up, so we get the unprecedented thrill of seeing Sasuke and Itachi teaming up! But typical of Naruto Shippuden at this point, just when it’s getting ‘edge of the seat’ exciting, we end the collection on a flashback story concentrating on Kabuto’s oh-so-tragic childhood.


If you’re a Naruto Shippuden fan, then this collection is compulsive, indeed essential viewing. It’s also the most infuriating and unrewarding the show has ever been, giving with one hand and taking away with the other.