Although they still may be outmatched by Kakashi, Naruto and Sakura show that they work well together in the 2nd iteration of the bell test. Naruto’s fighting maturity becomes very apparent as he doesn’t rush mindlessly into situations anymore and is capable of planning a couple of steps ahead so that he doesn’t get himself caught in compromising situations. Kage Bushin remains on of Naruto’s go-to jutsu, but Naruto demonstrates he can use it in a more thoughtful manner by using it to change his jumping direction in midair. Sakura also shows that she’s not as useless as she was in the first bell test as she shows off her combination of brute strength and chakara control to unearth Kakashi out of the ground. Kakashi tries some of his tricks that fooled Sakura and Naruto when they were genins, but he quickly realizes they see past those tricks now and will have to fight more seriously. Away from the fight, Jiraiya, Shizune, and Tsunade are impressed with their student’s progress as they watch from afar.
Meanwhile, Deidara continues to infiltrate the Sand village with his origami jutus. He scans around the Sand Village on his paper hawk and robotic eye, and he pays homage to the Alien movies with his combustable face-hugging paper spiders that take out the guards overlooking the sky. However, Deidara will need some more tricks if he’s going to tackle Gaara, who is immediately on the scene when Deidara lands his hawk.
A good episode overall, but I could have done without the constant flashbacks to Naruto and Sakura’s genin days. I know the episode wants to point out their improvements, but I feel like it’s being overdone a bit.
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Love the Underarmor reference =D. I think the creators are more trying to pace themselves rather than remind us of anything. If I had to choose between flashbacks or fillers, I would probably choose flashbacks. Why back in the good old days, we didn’t even have full episodes; we just had 15 minutes of new animation with the rest being flashbacks and woodflutes!
That is true now that I think about it more. The old series did have a large number of flashbacks as well.
“A good episode overall…” Are you kidding me? An episode like this is the very reason i stopped watching Naruto. I almost dropped Shippuden because of this episode. Luckily ep. 4 was not as brutal. Seems like money they saved from ep 3 was put into making ep 4. They need to STOP adding garbage and just stick to the manga. Two years of fillers were not enough? I can stand flashbacks, but i could not stand them adding stupid “fight” scenese between Naruto/Sakura vs Kakashi. Also when they forshadowed Kakashi’s weakness it ruined the surprise.
On a side note, it’s kind of understandable why they did it. If you’d been reading the manga, you’d realize that the main reason they did the two years of fillers was to give the manga time to get ahead of the anime. By the time it had gotten to the Naruto v Sasuke fight, the manga was only about 3 chapters or so ahead of the anime. Now the manga is a little under 100 chapters ahead (not including the side story about Kakashi’s childhood, which the anime has skipped for now)… the thing is, in terms of story progression, the manga hasn’t moved a whole lot. Especially since there’s been a whole lot of action chapters (won’t get into specifics to avoid spoilers), which means a lot of detailed double-page images and large frames for what amounts to a few seconds of animation.
The manga didn’t go into any detail on the re-iterated bells exam — it only had the beginning and end of the fight. This way, they’re getting 4 episodes out of 4 chapters (actually 4 chapters minus 2 pages). Which is probably a necessity since there are later points where a single chapter of the manga probably accounts for 5 or 6 minutes of anime. They can include the Kakashi Gaiden at any point as well now since it won’t really prove to be something of importance until much later (if at all — it hasn’t yet proven important in the manga either, but people love to speculate).
I like Sasuke, he’s a great character, really stylish and sexy! And his skills are second to none–but I never knew why he wanted to kill his brother so much…
this show is so cool