English Dub Review: Naruto Shippuden “Secrets of the Reanimation Jutsu”

Wait…Naruto isn’t learning the Reanimation Jutsu?

Spoilers Below

I was excited to get a full episode about the Reanimation Jutsu. I was hoping to get a full episode of Kabuto being a snarky son of a bitch to Madara about the ins and outs of how the Reanimation Jutsu works. What we get instead, however, is a pretty odd episode, separated into three very distinct chunks.

The first segment was Naruto trying to learn how to transform into Tailed Beast Mode so he can learn the Tailed Beast Bomb. As you can imagine, that didn’t last very long, because Naruto and Nine-Tails don’t exactly get along. Of course, Bee and Eight-Tails try to get Naruto to put a special spin on his Rasengan while in Tailed Beast Chakra Mode. As Naruto is making the Rasengan, Bee is astounded, because he is seeing Naruto start to make a Tailed Beast Bomb out of the Rasengan. In a moment of astute wisdom, Bee tells Naruto that Minato must have fashioned the Rasengan after the Tailed Beast Bomb. According to Bee, adding a change in chakra nature to the Rasengan / Tailed Beast Bomb is almost impossible. I don’t think Bee has seen the Rasen-Shuriken yet.

After the break, we finally get down to the secrets of Reanimation Jutsu. Madara finally gets Kabuto to tell him the everything about the jutsu. For instance, the hand signs, what goes in to the jutsu, how you make your sacrifices into the reanimated ninja, and at what power level they come back as. The writers here took a lot of information, and stuffed it within a 11 minute segment. I think that could have been spaced out more, and made into a full episode.

Then again, I don’t write the episodes, I just tell the writers where they fucked up. Coming out of this segment, there is a growing level of mistrust between Madara and Kabuto. I can only guess it’s from Kabuto acting like an elitist ass to Madara.  As for the final segment, it was just clipped on at the end of the Reanimation Jutsu segment. Granny Chiyo, Kimimaro, and Hanzō of the Salamander finally made it to the battlefield where Kiba, Neji, and Hinata are waiting to start an attack.

I know that the battle between the reanimated ninja and the not dead ninja is coming next week, so I can’t gripe. But this episode just felt like it landed in a bad place. “Secrets of the Reanimated Jutsu should have came about when Kabuto and Madara first teamed up. I’m sorry, but if someone told me (and subsequently showed me) an army made of the most legendary dead ninja ever, I would want to know right then and there everything about it, and how to turn if off after the war was over. Fuck that noise, the second Kabuto got out of line, I would go for that kill switch. They team up around episode 221, and Madara just  gets around to wanting to know everything about Edo Tensei? That’s some bad storytelling, Kishimoto.

Bad placement and clunky segments all hamper this segment. If you’re a fan of the show, you will probably watch it just to watch it. To me, there is no redeeming value of this episode other than a forced look into how to reanimate a ninja. I can see a lot of fans skipping this, because they want to see the ninja war. That should continue next week. This week, however, “Secrets of the Reanimation Jutsu” gets a loud “meh.”