Review for Naruto Shippuden: Box Set 5 (2 Discs)

Introduction

There's good news and bad news to be had with this collection of Naruto Shippuden. The good news is two-fold. First, we've reached that point in the series where someone in Japan realised that the majority of people now own widescreen sets. Yes indeed, from episode 54 onwards, Naruto Shippuden is presented in glorious anamorphic widescreen. Let's face it; you need all the real estate to get all nine of the fox demon's tails into shot. The second bit of good news is that Naruto also catches up with the Region 4 revolution in anime presentation. The episodes in this collection are presented in delicious native PAL. No longer the dreaded NTSC-PAL standards conversion for Naruto. The bad news is that the filler is back. You thought that it was over when the Naruto series came to an end. You may have thought that with Naruto Shippuden paced slower than an exhausted tortoise, stretched with excessive observatory and expositionary dialogue, and stretched further with copious flashback sequences, we may have avoided the frivolous, pointless filler that dragged Naruto down. Apparently going slower than a Sinclair C5 wasn't enough to stave off the filler, and in this volume, it makes a wholly unwelcome return. As long as it doesn't have an episode of Naruto p***ing all over the place…


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, of whom Sasuke's brother Itachi is a member, 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.


Manga Entertainment present the next 13 episodes of Naruto Shippuden spread across 2 discs, 7 episodes on disc 1, and 6 episodes on disc 2.

53. Title
54. Nightmare
55. Wind
56. Writhe
It was never going to be that easy. If the inconclusive encounter with Sasuke proved one thing, it showed Naruto that he is far behind Sasuke when it comes to developing his abilities and skills. After all, he can't cheat and use drugs or forbidden jutsu. Fortunately, Kakashi hasn't just been taking things easy in his hospital bed. He's come up with a crafty way of imparting information to his student, to give him Jonin level powers that will not only give him the skills to face Sasuke, but stand him in good stead against Akatsuki as well. But how do you give decades worth of training to someone in a matter of days or weeks, especially when that someone is an idiot?


57. Deprived of Eternal Rest
58. Loneliness
59. A New Enemy
60. Impermanence
61. Contact
The training is interrupted when reports come in of an attack near the border. It may be that the Village Hidden in Rain is taking advantage of the Akatsuki upheaval to alter the balance of power in the region. Asuma's team, Ino, Shikamaru and Choji are reunited to go and investigate, but the assignment of so many high level ninja leaves the village undermanned, and more importantly Naruto vulnerable. Tsunade's solution is to assign Team Kakashi to a nice, simple, safe d-rank mission. Yamato, Naruto, Sakura and Sai get to investigate some grave robbers who are plaguing the Fire Temple. But as always, the simple missions get complicated quickly. It turns out that the graves being robbed are the Hidden Tombs, the resting places of four high ranked ninja, and if their tombs are plundered, their secrets may become known to unsavoury characters. And Naruto's hackles are raised when he meets one of the monks defending the graves, an arrogant young warrior named Sora who seems to go out of his way to make Naruto's life difficult. But the enemy are already one step ahead; they've plundered the tombs and are making off with the coffins. Team Kakashi and the monks give chase, only to be drawn into a trap by a mysterious white haired figure and his three followers. It isn't just the coffins that they are after; they want one of the pursuers as well.


62. Teammate
63. The Two Kings
64. Jet-Black Signal Fire
65. Lockdown of Darkness
The battle is inconclusive, but with it clear that Sora is one of the targets of the group, it's decided that he should accompany Team Kakashi back to the Hidden Leaf Village to report to the Hokage. With Sai injured, it's also convenient for him to join the team, although neither Sora nor Naruto think it's a good idea. As well as assess the situation, both with the grave robbers and the tensions at the border with Hidden Rain, it falls to Naruto to show Sora around the village. Being shown something of a normal life begins to have its effect on Sora, but that is undone when he encounters Asuma. All his life, Sora has been shunned and mistrusted for the actions of his father, Kazuma. Kazuma was part of an elite ninja team tasked with protecting the Land of Fire, but he decided that protection meant deciding the land's destiny himself. Sora on the other hand believes his father was innocent, and is determined to prove that. Asuma was also a member of that team, and when he meets Sora, naturally the young man wants to know about his father. Asuma's guarded, but friendly, and he takes a shine to Sora. But that's before Sora learns the truth about what Asuma did to Kazuma. All hell breaks loose in the Hidden Leaf Village, and it's no coincidence that the grave robbers take the opportunity to attack as well.

Picture

Episode 53 is presented in a 4:3 regular format, but thereafter Naruto Shippuden switches to 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen. What's more, from this collection onward, the transfer becomes a native PAL one, clear and sharp throughout, with no issues regarding blended frames or ghosting. That said, for some bizarre reason, there are moments where significant judder is apparent in episodes 53, 57, 61 and 65. It's annoying but not too distracting. Shippuden's animation, and its character designs are sharper and crisper than Naruto's. It's certainly more detailed than the first series, and the colours are a little more muted. With the advent of filler, it does appear that the quality of the animation skips back a tad, and the animators cut a few corners. But it's not yet as bad as the worst of the Naruto filler.

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.

Extras

The discs get static menus, with the episode chapter breaks in place. Each episode ends in a brief animated Naruto comedy skit. The extras are on disc 2, 13 line art images in a Production Art Gallery, and trailers for the first Naruto Shippuden movie and the Naruto Shippuden series.

Conclusion

The Naruto filler returns, and as usual with it comes the disappointment. However, this time it isn't actually the filler that causes the sinking feeling, it's the downright soul-sucking pointlessness of the Naruto Sasuke encounter. It's been built up since the beginning of Shippuden, with that first episode commencing with a flash-forward, a taster of the good stuff to come. And Shippuden took its merry time getting to that good stuff, lounging through the Rescue Gaara arc, then eking out as much as possible from this arc, introducing the new characters Sai and Yamato, then slowly building up to another encounter with Orochimaru, and also, finally Sasuke. Sakura face to face with the boy she loves, Naruto confronting his best friend turned bitter enemy, the once promising Genin brought low by a desire for base revenge. Finally, finally, the good stuff! Except it isn't. Orochimaru interrupts, and it all deflates like a tired balloon. The bad guys vanish, the good guys realise just how outclassed they are, and the timetable for the big confrontation between Naruto and Sasuke gets pushed back 6 months in story time. In anime time, that will probably be in about 1000 episodes or so.


With that deadline established, it's back to the Hidden Leaf village for another bout of training before the rematch. It's time for Naruto to level up again, which this time means creating his own special move, rather than learning someone else's. In a Rocky movie, that training would be a ten-minute montage, set to some suitable power ballad. But this is Naruto; we're going to have episodes of this stuff. The mechanics of training get interrupted by character moments, with much of the comedy coming from Sai trying to grasp human nature and relationships by reading about them from a book, while there's a whole lot of politicking going on, with the character of Danzo apparently plotting against the Hokage, trying to impose his martial values on the Hidden Leaf Village, but it still feels like the story is spinning its wheels for four episodes.


I actually breathed a sigh of relief when the Shippuden filler started, as it at least is paced more naturally. Also, it appears on the surface to flow naturally from the manga storyline. It's signposted pretty early on in episode 54, with a nightmare that Naruto has presaging the filler storyline. Also, with Naruto's training focusing on honing his natural ninja talents, discovered to be Wind in episode 55, a lot of the filler storyline focuses on these natural ninja affinities, Wind, Earth, Lightning, Water and Fire. It actually feels as if it is backing up and adding to the manga storyline, something that the Naruto filler often failed to do, diverging completely.


Having said that, it is the same old, same old, with Naruto encountering a kindred spirit once more. There is no other storyline possible for Naruto filler apparently, whether it is the first series, Shippuden, or the movies. He will always meet someone with whom he develops a mutual antagonism only for that antagonism to be polished into a grudging friendship. It always transpires that the guest star has pretty much everything in common with Naruto, whether it is being shunned from an early age, or harbouring a secret ability. Once, with Gaara was enough, but they have to do it with everyone that Naruto meets. Apparently everyone hates Sora for something that his father did, and on top of that they fear him for the powers that he possesses. This filler arc actually adds to that, by making him eager for revenge against those who killed his father. So now Naruto sees not only himself in Sora, but Sasuke as well. The angst mounts and mounts.


What redeems it is the story, which is actually quite interesting. I certainly paid more attention to the tale of the history of the Land of Fire, the would be revolution when a band of elite ninja (of which Asuma was a member) fractured over where the power should lie, and wound up battling each other for the destiny of the land. It has its parallels with the Danzo storyline that is developing in the manga arcs, and naturally he plays a role here as well. Clichéd though he may be, the Sora character is intriguing enough, especially with how his past is connected to this storyline, and the friendship, almost surrogate father son relationship that develops when he meets Asuma. It makes the betrayal all the more poignant when he learns the truth about what happened between Asuma and his father. As this collection of episodes comes to a close, it becomes clear that someone is looking to finish what started ten years previously, and alter the balance of power in the Land of Fire. Sora looks to be a key player in all this, unwitting or otherwise.


I was expecting the Shippuden filler to be as dire as the filler in the Naruto series. It wasn't that bad at all. In fact, even with the clichés, I found it to be interesting and entertaining. It's a story that appears to fit naturally in the Naruto universe, rather than being clumsily squeezed in. But when I think about it, Shippuden has got a problem when the filler is more interesting than the manga storyline.