Amnesia on so many levels…
What They Say:
Ino sees Sakura falling from the sky. Although she manages to save her, the shock of the fall has left Sakura with amnesia
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the series having spent so much time on the lead up to the war and then the first blush encounters that have been mixed at best since it focused on supporting characters. They’ve had their moments and I liked the scale of things that was being brought into play, but so much of it felt like it was just cannon fodder material. We did get some minor but decent time with some of the more known members of the various villages and especially with Kakashi, but the majority of what we got felt like C-list characters getting their time in the sun even though they not have been seen for a couple hundred episodes. Especially now that Naruto is pretty much at the five hundred episode mark.
So enter this episode which focuses on Sakura, something that should bring delight to everyone. What makes it problematic though is that it’s a flashback/filler story of sorts with no real connection to current events. It’s a story focused primarily on Sakura and Ino as Ino helps to save Sakura at the village when she’s just suddenly falling from the sky. The event goes so badly for Sakura that she ends up getting a case of short term amnesia and is just uncertain bout a great many things. So that leaves Ino to try and jog her memory by doing things like taking her to familiar places and trying to reconnect her with her teammates since that’s who she spends most of her time with. Unfortunately, trying to explain who they are when they’re not around just makes them sound like utter buffoons. Which at times is pretty true, such as when she describes Naruto.
With some of the others joining in since Naruto isn’t around and Sasuke is long gone at this point, we get people like Tenten trying to help. But the show intends to have a lot of rather unbecoming fanservice along the way, including some overt chest shots from Hinata and Tsunade. It’s not that Tsunade’s chest isn’t visible most of the time, but it’s the way they do it, especially with poor Hinata around the halfway mark. The episode kind of wanders in a lot of ways as it goes on, bringing in Sakura’s parents for a bit as well, which eventually leads to cracking through a bit of the past. It’s not bad in how they do get to this eventually, and the flashback that comes from it (hurray for flashback within a flashback), but in the end it still feels like a really poorly placed episode.
In Summary:
While the episode ends with a news broadcast (ugh) that covers some of what’s going on with the war in the current tense, the bulk of the episode is simple Sakura storytelling that’s not bad, has some sweet moments but is essentially fluff. And as much as I might have enjoyed it on a basic level, I came away from the flashy pseudo-journalism of the end segment with a lot of disgust since in the midst of this war, where they’re showing the cost of it, the presenters are glib and light about it, moving from location to location. I get why they did it, but it feels like it’s gone a long way from how similar segments were done years ago in anime series involving war situations where it’d treat it right. Is this another cultural change that has happened?
Grade: B-
Streamed 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.
