Naruto Review

What earns its place among the greats is structural. Kishimoto writes his antagonists as the protagonist under different pressure, so Zabuza, Haku, Gaara, and eventually Sasuke all function as arguments about what isolation does to a child soldier. The Chunin Exams remain the best-designed shonen tournament because the Forest of Death and the preliminaries keep changing the win condition rather than simply raising the power level.

Rock Lee against Gaara and the Valley of the End are the peaks of the first run, both handled by outside talent with a looseness the rest of the show rarely matches. Shippuden is the same story after a time skip, and it adds the other two: Sasuke's fight with Itachi, and Pain's assault on the village, where the argument about child soldiers widens into one about war. The gap between those peaks and everything around them is the problem.

Pierrot ran ahead of the manga constantly, and the result is long stretches of static held cels, recycled cuts, off-model faces, and hundreds of filler episodes across the two runs that a viewer can skip without losing a plot beat. Toshio Masuda's score, especially the shakuhachi and taiko cues, and Yasuharu Takanashi's for Shippuden paper over a great deal of it. Judged on what it does when it is trying, this is foundational; judged frame by frame, it is badly uneven, and the second is why it is an A rather than an S.