What They Say:
The weather-controlling enemy is revealed to be Yota, a boy who came to the Leaf Village years ago and befriended the local kids, including Naruto.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
What’s worse than the last episode? Making it a two part story. Such is the case with this episode as we follow up more of the events involving Yota, the childling that was able to control weather that was causing a huge amount of problems in the present for a small group of the Allied Shinobi Forces. But like any story that introduces someone new and powerful for the war effort to deal with, it also has to go back and introduce him in the past because these things can’t just stand alone in the present. Everyone has to have a connection to someone else and that means its time to give us more of the young Naruto cast. Which also allows Sasuke to have some small role in it as well, giving his voice actor a chance to remember his character just a little bit.
Not surprisingly, the episode spends time in past and present to go through more of the tale, which is almost like a Huckleberry Finn kind of story with how we see the kids when they were very young playing and doing things with Yota and being generally happy with him. There’s a lesson to be learned in the middle of it as well with how Naruto treats Yota badly and Sakura and Ino get to call him out for the way he treated Yota like the villagers treated him. Which is what makes things in the present so hard as Naruto has to face Yota again, who is raging pretty well while Naruto is all literally fired up on his long, long journey to the real battle itself. He’s sidetracked so often with things like this that you just want to bang your head on each and every tree in the forest.
The episode spends a lot of time, and a montage sequence, showing how Naruto and Yota got along after Naruto sought him out and tried to do what he could to connect with him in a positive way. It’s bright, colorful and completely devoid of anything useful since we’ve seen a dozen times or more different ways that Naruto has grown at this age through interactions with all sorts of people. This is just one more tiny, tiny piece of a far too elaborate puzzle. Things are fun and light for a lot of it, especially when the others get involved, but we also see where things start to go wrong for Yota and the others in the past. And it’s all just prelude for… you got it, another episode of this.
In Summary:
Honestly, while I can deal with a lot of filler stories set in the present, the one thing I really can’t take much of is the Young Naruto stories. I hated them when Naruto was young, which is why the first series didn’t do much for me and it was the Shippuden series that got me more on track with the property. This episode spends so much time with young, innocent and misunderstood Naruto along with uninteresting Yota that it just rolls right over you and it makes zero impact. There’s only so many busy stories of Naruto’s past you can tell before it gets to be so much that it’s impossible to have really happened. And sadly, this series passed that stage ages ago and everything else is just adding insult to injury.
Grade: D
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.
I always thought Yota was implanting those memories when he flicked their heads