Can you see flashback? Sadly, if you’re a Naruto fan, you can say it all too easily and all too often.
What They Say:
Memories from his childhood course through Naruto’s mind as he rests to recover from his hyperventilation.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
As events continue to build up with all that’s going on, and after a really good segment involving Sasuke and Danzo that did involve some minor flashback material, Naruto has decided to sink into full on flashback material once again as it centers on the endless rivalry between Naruto and Sasuke. Having watched something like four hundred and fifty episodes of Naruto now between the two series, we get it. They have issues. There’s a bond there. A strong connection that has Naruto continually doing whatever he can to save Sasuke while Sasuke does his best to keep pushing him away so he can go on and achieve his goals. Whether he does it out of concern for them, by not wanting to drag them in or just seeing them as a drag on him, it doesn’t matter, he just doesn’t want them there. Yet Naruto keeps trying and trying, to the point where he’s exhausted and now having fragmented dreams of the past.
Focusing on their early encounters and showing how Naruto watched as he realized that Sasuke lived only for revenge against his brother, it sets the stage easily for what’s to come. It also goes back to the early Shippuden material with Sai as he calls out Sasuke for what he’s done and why Sakura and Naruto continue to chase him as they value the bonds that have been created between them. At times, the flashbacks jump all over the place so it’s not a linear re-telling of the long struggle between the two young men, though it does look like some of it has either been re-animated or at least zoomed in a bit for it to be shown in widescreen since they go back to the original series and to the early part of Shippuden when it was still a full frame series. The scenes do look good and consistent with what we’re seeing now for the most part which is at least nice.
The only real positive to this experience for me was getting to see some of the time spent with the Pervy Sage as I’ve always liked him as a character and felt that there was a lot more material to mine with their two years of training that occurred between the series that could make for great stories. It’s small, but it’s decent. This episode does spend some time in the present as well, as we see Naruto working through his minor illness, but even then it goes back to fairly recent material with Pain and the like to explore the challenges that Naruto has to face. I do agree that you have to make newbie-accessible episodes at times, but the chances of them starting in on this episode is slim as they’re more likely to just jump on at some random point or because they discovered the manga and so forth.
In Summary:
Episodes like this may be good in some ways as they’re meant to remind viewers of certain events and connections, but they’re also useful for the animators and staff to take some time off and refresh themselves after working hard. But they’re hard on the longtime fans who have gone through so many different versions of these kinds of flashback episodes that you feel like you could script one in your sleep and at the least come up with the same kind of moments used. There’s a wealth of things that they can do to flesh out the world of Naruto if they need a break, or other ways to show the bonds, so it’s easy to feel an episode like this is a copout in trying to continue to build the tension of events. We get it. I understand the business and human realities of doing them, but I wish they’d find other things to do than this type of episode.
Grade: D
Simulcast By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
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