So, I am a self-described reluctant Otaku.  In my younger years I would skip back from class knowing the next episode of Kenshin was waiting for me.  I watched Dragon Ball Z in high school, and discovered that Z was rubbish compared to the original series a few years later.

But over the past few years certain factors have taken the excitement from Japanese Animation for me.  One of which, being the sheer lack of other Anime enthusiasts over the age of 20 in my region.  Secondly, the one guy who was a fan was 45 and a little to into anime.  There is a point where you don't put Love Hina figurines on your desk at work, especially if you are anyone's boss.

Third, nothing looked fresh any longer.  That is not to say it was, that was just the way things appeared.  I had seen countless series about wizards, wars, mechs, space battles, samurais, gunslingers, bounty hunters, bla bla bla.  It just seemed that the industry would be hard pressed to come up with anything original.  And there seemed to be a shift towards the "Seek and Capture" style story in most everything that I came across.

 So for the past few years I have been limited to one or two shows that adult swim plays after their mostly great comedy lineup.  I watched some Ghost in the Shell but lost interest.  Tried to watch Bleach, but the format turned me off. 

 They played a series on the IFC called "Samurai Seven” which was a nice steam punk adaptation of "The Seven Samurai" one of my favorite movies of all time.   It renewed my faith that Anime still has some game for an aging Otaku like myself.

 But recently I have been hounded by a friend to watch Naruto.  On and on for a few months he would drop hints whenever I would see him online.  I had seen one or two episodes of the English Dub on Cartoon Network.  The voices, particularly of protagonist Naruto, were grating, so I was skeptical of his advice.

 Sadly, I can only be badgered so long before I give in and watch whatever a person demands I watch.  This time though it wasn't a bad thing.  

 So I got my hands on a Subtitled version of season one of the series.  Here is the breakdown.

Positives:

If you watch it subtitled, you may notice that the voice acting is quite good.  You may also notice that Naruto never once utters the dreadful phrase they make him say every 5 minutes in the Dub version.  Which indicates that they add the phrase just to make the dubbing synch up better with the original Japanese mouth animation.  A pretty common tactic, but still aggravating.  Which is why I regularly watch the Sub versions of shows.

If anyone is wondering what that phrase is, look it up yourself, I won't utter it here. 

When the action is in full force it is interesting and face paced.  Let alone the variation of styles between each fight is downright creative and keeps the viewer guessing what will come next.  I appreciate it when the series takes unexpected turns.

They have built a well-varied cast of personalities.  From the Main characters to tertiary roles everyone has a distinct persona and style that implies depth even on the most background characters.  I have a great admiration for any storyteller that is willing to flesh out each person beyond what is needed just to get from point A to point B in a story.  It adds that extra believability to the world they are creating. 

Negatives:

Though I like that the series is heavy on the "Story Arc" type of style, in the first season three significant things have happened.  And two of them happened in the span of 6 episodes together.  So that leaves 20 episodes to complete one large-scale task.  Now if they had broken it into say 15 smaller tasks it would have played out better.  This was very reminiscent of my DBZ days, where folks would stare each other down for 10 minutes, fight for 3 seconds, and then spend 8 more minutes agonizing over the others actions.

Add to that a good 5 minutes of flash backs to anything from 4 minutes beforehand to 3 episodes back.

Now I really don't mind if a show wants to point on some miniscule detail that everyone might have missed, but when you review something that was major plot point of something that happened in the previous episode for 4 minutes, I can only assume that they view their audience as idiots with 0 long term memory.  The same goes for when they spend the first 4 minutes (I timed this) at the beginning of one episode reviewing in a "previously on Naruto" style recap.

In the time they spent with all this nonsense they could have made 6 new episodes and gotten further in the series.  But that would require new animation and cost more.  So in the long run it was a lot more cost-efficient just to recap and hope people would be happy with a very light on content story arc.

And that is all I really didn't like about it, it felt like it was stalling for time to the extent that I found myself yelling at the screen, "GET ON WITH IT!"

Now I have been told that the series really comes into its own after Season One, so I am going to give it a few more episodes before I wander off in some other direction in my typical ADD fashion.  I will give a second review after I watch season 2.