Naruto - Filler Arc - Episode 136 to 220

 Anime Review by Flammy

Naruto is named after the main character of the series, Naruto Uzamaki. Naruto is a young ninja who is constantly searching for recognition and aspires to become a Hokage in his village, apply named Leaf Village. Hokage is the ninja in the village acknowledged as the leader and the strongest of all. Twelve years prior, a Nine-Tailed Demon Fox attacked the Leaf Village and the fourth Hokage sacrificed his own life to seal the demon inside Naruto when he was a newborn. The fourth Hokage, who was celebrated as a hero for sealing the demon fox away, wanted Naruto to be respected in a similar light by being the containment vessel for the demon fox. The Leaf Village, however, shunned him, regarding Naruto as if he were the demon fox itself and mistreated him throughout most of his childhood. A decree was made that forbade anyone to discuss or mention the attack of the demon fox to anyone, even their own children.

With that, the story starts to unfold with all types of great characters and plot. The story follows the manga closely and catches up rather quickly. Once the anime caught up with the manga, the creation of filler episodes, that are not required to understand the basic plot, were created. No one expected one of the longest continuous blocks of filler in any manga-based anime known as the "Year of Filler."


First I can not stress enough that there is no plot. It is all terrible. In the original Naruto manga there is a time slip of three years; you never see what happens to all the characters. Since they could not mess with the plot, it was decided to fill in the 3 year gap instead with 85 episodes of filler. This did give time for the manga to get ahead some more. However for three years there is no growth to anyone for 85 episodes. Listen carefully again, 85 episodes straight of no plot! Stagnet boring nothingness! It is an epic failure.

However the one saving grace is its characters. The characters all stay the same from the previous plot fill arcs. Since there is no plot here now, there is no killing off or adding of characters. So for the amount of characters that remain from the previous story helps save this arc from what would have been the usual result of a Godzilla attack in Tokyo leaving everything in its path a pile of garbage. This is the only saving grace. Lets think back to the first Matrix movie. It was good and had memoriable characters. When the sequels were made everyone thought it was going to be good but they killed off all the characters and stunk terribly. Hmm... I actually lost my train of thought. I have no idea where I was going with that. No matter how good characters may be, if the plot stinks, that just makes things sad.


As for the animation, it does not matter if the animation was any good, because after 5 episodes if you haven’t started ramming kunais repeatedly into your eyes, you sure will be! Because of the blinding rage of pain, I could not see any animation. When a series makes you blind, you know something went wrong somewhere.

And then there is the music. The music could be the greatest found in the world, but if a tree falls down in the woods and there is no one else around, does anybody really care? Music gets 0/10. You can try to argue that there might be some good songs but the music gets a failing grade for simply being associated with the filler arcs. The music is an accessory to murder and keeps its grade of 0/10.

Anime fans like to complain about Dragon Ball Z Freeza Arc in which the plot involve a planet that was going to blow up in 5 minutes but the fight lasted 5 episodes after that statement was uttered. DBZ holds nothing to this 85 episodes of Naruto filler. The Naruto filler arcs deserves to to be buried in the same pit as all the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 2600) catridges from 1982!

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