An American holidy is scheduled for this day, and there are some high profile movies in theaters, so they don’t seem to be releasing a lot this week. That’s fine; there’s just less to distract from the fantastic pick of the week.
First, the genre releases:
- Cyberteam in Akihabara: Part of the “Complete Collection” series.
- Doctor Who: The Complete “First” Series: The quotation marks are my insertion. I bought this in Canada months ago; it’s a well made set of a very good show.
- The Legend of Prince Valiant – Complete Series, Vol. 1: Yet another multiple volume “complete series”.
- Naruto (Uncut) Vol. 1: I’ve been told I’d love this by someone who knows my tastes well.
Now, the non-genre releases:
- Charlie’s Angels: Season Three
- The Matador: This looked somewhat amusing, but I never got around to seeing it.
Now, the pick of the week. In case you hadn’t already guessed from the looks of these very limited pickings, it’s Doctor Who. Every episode in this series has been reviewed; you should already know what makes the series so great. Pick it up if you haven’t already.
Naruto
Naruto has a fun premise and a very cool style, but it degrades into Dragon Ball Z esque battles that span multiple episodes which mainly consist of the characters staring and grunting at each other.
Re: Naruto
To put it more precisely, everything up to episode 140 (or whichever episode it is that Naruto fights Sasuke on the lake) is pretty good, but they go into filler after that (currently, two and a half seasons worth) in order to allow the manga to get far enough ahead that it’s feasible to animate it.
I don’t think it quite degrades to the Dragonball level of
Goku: "I WILL NOW FIGHT AT FULL POWER"
Frieza: "OH HO! BUT I HAVE ONLY BEEN FIGHTING AT A THIRD OF MY POWER" *transforms*
…then twelve episodes later a punch is thrown. Naruto’s usual structure has Naruto get the crap kicked out of him until he gets angry enough to release his demon powers (serious episode) or pull a Sexy no jutsu (comedic episode).
Plus Ninjas are cool.
Re: Naruto
I’m, admittedly, more familiar with the manga than the anime. The manga was notorious for having chapters where the characters did nothing but recap the last 10 chapters we just read!
I watched the anime up until episode 18 and there were definitely fights that could have been shortened with less staring and "powering up." Nothing as bad as DBZ, I agree, but certainly in the same league and looking like it was going all the way in that direction.
Anime tv shows in general suffers from this. Though I like continuing story lines, a far departure from the "one shot" episodes of American Saturday morning cartoons, the Japanese have a frustrating way of showing you only a 1/4 of story development and heaps of character development in a given season. That or they’ll suddenly close off a plotline in the last 3 episodes of the season seemingly out nowhere and with little context to what has happened up to that point.
Oi, that turned into a rant.
Re: Naruto
I’m the opposite as I’m more familiar with the anime than the manga. From what I’ve been told (and from what I’ve seen in Shonen Jump) the majority of the episodes are based on about 2 chapters of the manga.
The first story arc/season in the anime contains some of the most protracted fights, but once they hit season two (the Chunin exam) it speeds back up. What they end up doing with the fights is in one episode they’ll end a fight and start the next one, which is finished in the next episode (classic cliffhanger construction). There are some that are more protracted (Rock Lee vs. Gaara) and some that are shorter (Chouji vs. that sound ninja and Hinata vs. Neji).
I think our perceptions of the structure of anime series in general are a little off since, for the most part, we tend towards watching collections rather than watching them once a week as they are originally aired.