After a surprisingly good short story arc, Naruto returns once more to treading water. Episode 208 is a standalone story about Naruto and Kiba being assigned to protect a great treasure on its journey to a museum exhibition. The item in question is the Kachou Fuugetsu, a delicate teacup that is worth a fortune and is therefore a prime target for bandits. Naruto and Kiba have to escort the Kachou Fuugetsu and Shin’emon, the man assigned to transport it, on the perilous journey and deal with everything that comes their way. Unfortunately, Shin’emon cares about nothing but the Kachou Fuugetsu, and his frequent disregard for his life and those of his protectors lead to no end of problems until he is forced to see the error of his ways in the predictable ending.
It’s back to autopilot for the series once again. You’ve seen everything in it a hundred times before, from the ‘this is worth more than my life!’ sentiments to the Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade rip-off ‘i can just reach it!’ ending. Much of it makes very little sense, if you’re hired to protect a great and delicate treasure why would you send your two most impulsive and clumsy ninjas? But it’s the unforgivably cheesy ‘nothing’s more important than a human life’ morals coupled with the insanely annoying and two-dimensional Shin’emon that really drag it down. What happened to the urgency and tension the last few episodes had? What happened to the emotional attachment, great drama and brilliant action the first 80-odd episodes had? Once again Naruto proves that it is a shadow of its former self, the animation is noticeably lower quality and it’s become too much of a self-parody. During this period in the manga Naruto was training hard with Jiraiya to become as strong as he possibly can, in the anime he undertakes a string of pointless missions and gets angry a lot. Rubbish.
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NeoBlade says:
lol I remember watching this thinking.. Give me back those 23 mins of my life. Damn it was a poor episode and a very poor excuse of a Naruto filler. At least with Bleach they’ve tried to do something in their fillers but Naruto is approaching notorious levels that One Piece have set for such things…
Nov 19, 2006, 7:16 am