English Dub Review: Boruto: Naruto Next Generations “The Boy With the Sharingan”

Sarada should’ve just stayed home.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Strange things are afoot in the lands surrounding the Leaf Village. Sasuke has come across a strange white-skinned boy who bears the Sharingan in his eyes. After a brief fight with the boy, Sasuke sends word back to the village with a messenger hawk. Once Naruto receives the report, he decides he needs to address this matter personality and departs the village.

Sarada pursues him with the intent of finding her father after picking up lunch for Naruto from Boruto and receiving Shikamaru’s permission to go run off into the woods. Chochou joins her in her fool’s errand, which actually ends up slowing her down because Chouchou can’t run very fast or very far. As they take a moment to rest, the strange white-skinned boy from earlier ambushes Sarada, but Naruto soon arrives to defend them. Using his vast power, Naruto is able to fend off the boy and save Sarada and Chouchou from certain disaster.

Following this, Sarada, Chouchou, and Naruto all have lunch together. Sarada takes a moment to ask Naruto about her father, whom she has never met. Naruto reflects on his time with Sasuke and shares with Sarada his long-standing rivalry with Sasuke. After sharing that moment with her, Naruto gives Sarada his permission to go find Sasuke as long as she doesn’t stray too far. Sarada gladly accepts Naruto’s blessing and heads off to meet her dad for the first time.

Sadly, their meeting is not the heartfelt introduction Sarada thought it would be, as Sasuka immediately draws a sword on her and demands to know who she is.

Our Take:

Sarada’s quest for her dad continues in another awkward episode of Boruto that is too toothless to capture any of the excitement of the original show. Things are slowly moving towards some actual plot development with some antagonists starting to reveal themselves and some more relevant character conflicts rising to the surface. But, as you might expect, Sarada’s desire to find out her true lineage isn’t a compelling plotline, but one that highlights the major flaws of the show that are only becoming more compounded on week after week.

Sarada is the emotional core of the episode, so if her conflicts don’t work then the rest of the story will surely crumble, which it does. Much like Boruto, Sarada strikes me as being a bit spoiled, and the curiosity of her questioning if Sakura is her mother has given way to the sheer ridiculousness of her actually following through on this fool’s errand. It’s pretty obvious that Sakura is her actual mother and that she’s just being a dumb kid. With that in mind, there’s no mystery to discover here, and there’s no interesting motivation for Sarada other than her own childish stupidity. I don’t like watching dumb kids do dumb things, and that’s all we’re getting with this episode. Not to mention, I don’t understand why Naruto and Shikamaru are so okay with Sarada running off into the woods by herself. It’s one thing for a kid to be stupid, but for high-ranking members of the village to just “be cool” with grade school kids getting into dangerous situations is too much for suspension of disbelief to overcome.

The fighting isn’t terribly interesting to watch either. The fight with the white-skinned is resolved too quickly to make him feel like an actual threat, and there is a feeling of invincibility to the characters that neuters any sense of danger that might make the scene interesting.

Nothing about this episode, or this show for that matter, feels real. Though anime is obviously just animation, it has a great ability to wield emotion, character, and art to great effect in immersing the viewer into the world of the story. But because of all the cheap, hand-waving turns in the plot that doesn’t adhere to a sense of internal logic or any sense of reality, the story is incredibly weak. Kids don’t act this way, adults don’t act this way, and even 20 episodes in the show is having a problem finding ways to make me care about its characters. Just because the cast is related to the cast of a better show doesn’t make me care about their petty problems.

But this isn’t a surprise. Boruto isn’t an honest effort gone wrong. It is a lack of effort entirely.

Score
4/10