Thread: Shippūden: Episode 26

Ditto to pretty much what everyone was saying. Jokes aside, i did like the water laser jet thingy, that technique must be using millions of pascals to give the water jet stream enough power to cut rocks, that's pretty cool. The first few minutes were nothing special.

But seeing the Mozaemon versus the that other puppet group (i can't remember the name ><) would be one of the best fights ever in Naruto. In my opinion, it's a match for the Gaara vs. Lee fight. That's the naruto anime magic that was missing for so long.

i have to say it sakura at her best

It was about bloody time. I don't want this anime to go to pot.

Well, you can clearly see the animation has drastically changed this episode, for the good !
It's the same animation-usage as the fighting sequence between Naruto and Sasuke when Sasuke had reached his Level 2 and Naruto with his one-tailed Kyuubi chakra-power and in the scene between Orochimaru and the Third Hokage. I think they only use this type at the major fight-scenes, because you can see the difference with this fight and the fights between team Kakashi vs. fake Itachi and team Gai vs. fake Kisame, that was just, not great:P

I havent watched naruto in a while but after the good positive comments I watched it and the puppet fights were fucking awesome and the animation was pretty good

Yeah, but the effort they put in this time makes me disappointed somewhat. It seems to me, they only like to work hard when it comes to "special" episodes such as Naruto vs. Sasuke. I don't know about you guys, but I would like some consistency. Don't want crap animation and story telling for 24 episodes and 1 good fight episode.

this episode was pretty good......at least better than the other crap

Best shipuuden episode yet

Well hot damn! How's that for a pleasant surprise?

For once we seem to have a more-or-less unified positive opinion and you know what, I'm going to add to it. After having spent the last few months ranting about how crap the series had become I put off watching this episode for a whole week and had resolved that if they screwed this one up, I'd quit watching the series altogether. But what a nice rally! Just when it looks like the series is going to pot, crack, LSD, ice and magic mushrooms they actually manage to NOT completely screw up one of my favourite battles!

OK, before I start gushing this is STILL far from perfect. The first half was, as has already been pointed out, mostly the same old crap and even the more impressive second half still paled in comparison with most of the fights in the original series. The ridiculous 'to the last second' thing with the antidote was utterly stupid- it's as if the instant Sakura injects it she become IMMEDIATELY immune to the poison for EXACTLY 180 seconds (give or take an episode) and when that time is up it INSTANTLY wears off. Which isn't the way it works, and Kishimoto didn't do it that way in the manga. Way too much time was spent on both Sasori's fire attack and the excessively drawn out and overdramatised ending of the episode. The Naruto and Kakashi stuff was a waste of time as always and the recap of the puppet duel when Sasori recounts how Chiyo attached strings to the Kazekage's head was even worse (and canonically stupid; if Chiyo had attached strings to the kazekage already, why didn't she try to save Sakura from it herself?) Additionally, the chakra seal that Sakura threw at Sasori looked really weird as it expanded, way too rubbery. But for once, that's pretty much all I have to complain about.

Going into the second half, I was feeling very despondant. But as soon as Chiyo began summoning the puppets from the scroll, I got a good feeling. The animation managed to accurately recreate the sequence from the manga and for the rest of the episode the action was the best we'd seen in AGES. There was real action animation for the various fighting sequences, although Sasori's puppets were mostly reduced to nondescript blurs. More importantly, for the first time in GOD knows how long the anime managed to actually improve on the manga. Some of the added content was actually quite neat- people have already mentioned the water attack which wasn't bad, but it was the expanded fight between the puppets that made it worth the money. We got far more detail on how Chiyo's puppets worked (as well as how they slowly got overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of Sasori's) and Shippuden finally serves up a reason for us manga readers to bother watching the anime other than "it has colour and voice acting".

Plus, although I DID think the lead-up was excessively drawn out, the bit at the end where the screen fades to black within a mere second of showing us the last shot of Sakura impaled on Sasori's sword was REALLY cool. And taking it all the way to there means they did the ENTIRE versus Sasori AND massive puppet battle BOTH within a single episode! That's AMAZINGLY fast compared with how glacially slow the series has been going so far!

I'm finally starting to regain hope that this series will manage to remain worth watching, and possibly even regain the glory we haven't seen since the end of episode 134. FINALLY I can start looking forward to the next episode rather than dreading it. I just hope this isn't a one-off and they can maintain this momentum. Please...

Thank you gods of anime ThANK YOU!!~!! you pulled naruto's but out of the fire with that episode!!!!^ totally agree with you on that last statement(except i liked the bug arc and the one with garra in it {216-220})