Anime: Gekijouban Naruto: Dai Koufun! Mikazukijima no Animal Panic Datte ba yo!

This is the third Naruto movie, made well after the fillers had kicked in the main series. By now the franchise had turned to a farce and only diehard fans kept up with it, just because they didn’t want to admit their favorite show had gone under. This movie was made just for kicks and you see right away how the producers didn’t even try to make it a little bit interesting just for the sake of novelty. The first was memorable for the movie gimmick, the second for the weird blend of cultures, but this one is a complete joke. And it’s not even a funny one. You no longer feel like it is the tale of a boy trying to live by and be accepted in a rough world, but a bunch of clowns goofing around in a poor attempt to keep us interested.

Although the atmosphere and plot are equal to a tv filler episode (rock bottom), the production values remain of higher caliber and the battles are far more dynamic. Which at this point it is basically the only thing a Narutard could say to defend this ridiculous franchise.

The basic plot is about our heroes escorting an obnoxious king and his nihilistic boy prince back home. This prince Hikaru is your average bored-to-death modern kid, pampered, without hobbies, wears glasses and plays videogames all day. I guess the emo kids with a bleak past were no longer selling so they tried to appeal to the average person who would watch this. So anyways, later on a circus comes into the action. Do you believe we moved from a world in the brink of war and mechanized ships destroying villages to a four-eyes going to see some clowns? And seriously, although the first movie was also about escorting royalty, Jaru is a completely nerdy and lame character. Hell, at least Temujin from the second movie could fight. This jackass can’t even walk!

Of course it couldn’t remain so boring; we are supposed to have some excuse for battles here, remember? So later on there are marriage problems with the king’s ex-wife, and his kingdom is usurped by his viceroy, and there are these mercenaries who are hired to kill them all. Of course their coup doesn’t work so well because Naruto goes Super Saiyan just because the writer doesn’t want to let him die. And why the devil is the villain so stupid? He captures and imprisons the king when all he wanted was to kill him? And seriously, did the most powerful ninjas really need the help of a circus troupe to infiltrate a simple mansion? This makes no sense… But as I said, this was made just for kicks and has absolutely no consistency to the power levels or the motivations of the characters. The heroes appear to be rookies when in the main series they are elites, and the opposing ninjas don’t even have a symbol on their head guards. And apparently a circus tiger is more powerful than all of them put together.

Once again, only Naruto is important to the plot. The villains are again shallow as hell and the good guys are there just because the movie is supposed to be mostly action and needed more people to fill in the fights. This time they have Lee as a cameo and since he is a comic relief, he does his usual running around very fast gimmick. And for no apparent reason he wears those metallic rods to slow him down most of the story. He only removes them after he is owned and it would look cool to do a comeback.

Not even the action is that good in comparison to the second movie. It feels far more cartoony, silly, and predictable. And the budget is also quite run down too. They are drawn in a blobby way, with very little or no lightning and shading on them. The visual effects are also bad, with rather crude 3D effects and poorly drawn explosions. It even ends the usual way (Rasengan on the villain’s face and Naruto giving his motivational monologue to the emo kid that makes everything feel right). Anyhow, this is complete disaster of a movie and one of the worst additions to the franchise. Not even worth watching for the sake of completing your movie collection.

This is the third Naruto movie, again running in parallel to the series, not in sequence. Best watched after episode 180 and before the start of the second series, I would personally recommend viewing it between episodes 201 and 202, given the relevance of the characters involved and their progress state.

Note that I am reviewing from the point of view of someone who is up to date with the episodes of the series, and has seen the first two movies. (Expect heavy comparisons.)

Visuals: 5 (1st Movie = 8 / 2nd Movie = 9)
The visual quality of Naruto Movie 3 is vastly below standards in comparsion with the previous movies. Where the first movie did a decent job, and the second one exceeded expectations, this one fails to keep that stride and unfortunately takes a step back in quality.

There are only really one or two positive visual aspects. Firstly, the colour palette is as varied and vibrant as ever. All the artwork is bright and eyecatching, and gives even the duller shots a picturesque feel. Also, if the movie is watched between episodes 201 and 202 of the series as recommended above, the general animation quality of the movie appears to be quite good.

But that's also the first of its faults too: episodes 201 and 202 (infact episodes 137 up to 220) of the series are all filler episodes and of a noticably lower visual standard to the rest of the series. With that in mind, saying that the movie is of a better animation quality than the filler episodes in the series isn't really giving it much praise. In fact, I'd say that for most of the movie, the animation quality of the movie borders the quality of the proper episode sagas of the series, and rarely surpasses it. For a movie, it surely should. To have been released at the cinema, is it wrong to expect something more visually extravagant than the tv series? I think not.

So alright... at the moment, the above critique could be applied (more or less) to the first movie, but when I reviewed that I thought there was something about the visuals which wasn't as bad as this one. But what? Well, it was the degree of grandeur and spectacular nature of the action. This third movie lacked it tremendously. Fight scenes were short and timid compared to previous efforts. Almost like this movie was aimed at REALLY young kids, where too much breathtaking action might 'scare' them. Everything came across as ameteurish - there wasn't any sense of skill or smart combat that I've come to expect. I could see sparks of something special hidden below the surface at times - like I knew what the visuals were capable of - but they were always kept covered with a mostly bland and useless display of sequences.

Sound: 5 (1st Movie = 9 / 2nd Movie = 9)
The sound aspect of this movie is as decidedly average as the visuals. To be honest, it does have some familar scores of music - not exactly from the series, but simlar to it - but they do not have a particularly noteworthy effect on the overall movie. A lot of the score seems a bit childish and slapstick - exaggerating these qualities for the movie itself.

The voice acting doesn't leave a lasting impression. Apart from the main Naruto characters, there are no standout voices. The little boy Hikaru has a pretty annoying voice too. Contrastingly, the sound effects are probably the movie's strongest sound-related aspect, with good explosion sounds, fight sounds and the usual bag of tricks.

Story: 1 (1st Movie = 7 / 2nd Movie = 4)
I don't lightly give the story of this movie such a low score. It really is terrible. To be blunt, I would rather watch a random filler episode plot from the series than watch what is presented here in this movie.

This whole movie appears to be a giant series filler episode of the lowest quality. What maturity MAY have been built up during the duration of the series, or even the first two movies, was torn down in these 90 minutes where a ridiculously childish storyline took centre-stage. There was no serious plot or theme in this movie whatsover. If anything, it was family oriented.

This third movie sees Naruto, Sakura, Rock Lee and Kakashi trying to escort a circus, a fat 40-year old prince and his annoying son as they try to make their way to their home kingdom. Thus far, I have no real problem with "escort" nature of the mission - even though it's something that's become common-nature within Naruto - but what results is a poorly executed setup and climax involving short-lived enemies, and circus folk coming to aid a blatant rescue. It's predictable because it's so silly - you can think to yourself "what's the silliest thing that could happen here?" and chances are it will occur.

The fight sequences between the so-called powerful enemies are way too short to consider them exciting. There is a moment when Naruto makes a typical midfight comeback, which genuinely got me excited in the moment, but this was over very quickly and didn't live up to the build-up. All of the the main Naruto cast fights were of this sort of nature - and all very very short. It made me question that if this movie wasn't going to showcase spectacular fights, then what else was it good for? Certainly nothing story-related. There were no decent subplots or revelations.

Even if this Naruto movie was geared with the younger audience in mind, if they've seen any of the series or first two movies I'm quite sure they would consider this a sub-par attempt.

Characters: 2 (1st Movie = 7 / 2nd Movie = 3)
The main Naruto characters featured in this movie, as mentioned before, are Naruto, Sakura, Rock Lee and Kakashi. And thus is the basis for the character aspect of the film receiving any score at all. There are no other decent characters in this movie, nor are the main cast used to their full effect or positively developed.

All the main cast excluding Naruto, are seemingly interchangable, and have little or no bearing on the course of events, or worst of all, display their full fighting ability as we have seen in the series. Kakashi pulls out some random water-based moves that don't give any sort of impressive impression; Sakura is again cut short from fights and almost useless as a focus; and Rock Lee, who by far is involved in the most interesting and exciting fight, is really under-shown and makes you feel as though the movie producers just couldn't be bothered to give him decent screen time. All the real focus is on Naruto, who disappointingly does not showcase much ability - even his most common moves are not particularly well used and for the majority of the film, his role is either of a babysitter or clown.

The supporting characters provide the most annoyance - the adult prince and his son are impeccably irritating as the focal piece of this movie, and their childish nature and ignorance literally just made me feel sad that Naruto and his friends had to even spend a minute with these two morons. To top this, we have a range of circus folk and their animals who bulk out most scenes with, incorporating some sort of underlying message about how animals can amazingly come to your aid f you befriend them. It's all very 5-year old stuff.

The villians of the movie come on strong when we first see them, and seem like they would really provide a tough challenge for the team to face off against. But oddly their subsequent fights are very very small, with no particularly deep explanation into their backgrounds either, making their screen time also very short.

The majority of the character based interaction is spent between Naruto and the prince's son, who of course being a spoiled brat, makes him annoyingly hard to like. And even towards the end, when you predictably know how he's going to miraculously learn a lesson and change his ways, you still dislike him, because he made so much of the movie a bore.

Value: 1 (1st Movie = 7 / 2nd Movie = 5)
I cannot give the replay value of this movie any higher a score. There's about a 1 in a 100 chance (realistically), that i'll watch it again, and even that has to be when the following conditions apply: a) I watch the filler episodes of the series again and get to around episode 201 - which in itself is quite unlikely, and b), I've forgotton so much of this move that I decide to see if it was really as bad as I can remember.

Enjoyment: 1 (1st Movie = 8 / 2nd Movie = 6)
I thought that if the Naruto movies kept their trend, I would only dislike this movie slightly more than the previous one. As it turns out, I really REALLY didn't like it. It's such a shame since I love the series and even the first two movies, and so I always feel like I'm betraying Naruto for saying some bad against it. But objectively, that's just how it is. Do I think anyone else would like this movie? To be honest, I think that some of the really younger viewers might, but even they would probably agree it was their least favourite Naurto outing. I was expecting it to have reduced Naruto to its most base format, but I didn't think it'd go this far into converting it to such garbage. A true disappointment; please do better next time.