Boruto: Naruto the Movie (2015)

Boruto: Naruto the Movie arrives as the seventh theatrical outing for a franchise that has spent two decades teaching children to throw shuriken at their problems. Directed by Hiroyuki Yamashita in his debut, the film concerns a boy who resents his father's job, which is a fair complaint when the job is running an entire village. The narrative engine is a domestic grievance dressed in ninja clothing. We have seen this before. We will see it again.

The cultural ledger here is remarkably clean. The cast is uniformly Japanese, the concerns are uniformly familial, and the film has no interest in the various social projects that occupy the Western release calendar. One character, Sarada Uchiha, announces an ambition to lead the village, a detail the film treats as ordinary shounen business. It is a female aspiration, noted and then filed away. A subplot concerning a scientist who wishes to mass-market ninja tools gestures at the cheapening of tradition through commerce, but the objection is to cheating, not to capital. The villains want immortality. They do not want quarterly earnings.

The film's actual sermon, delivered through fists and a giant spiraling sphere of energy, concerns honesty and the obligations of a father. Boruto cheats in an exam, is caught, and learns that borrowed power is hollow. This is moral instruction of the oldest kind, and the movie is content to let a fight scene carry it. There is no lecturing, no glossary of terms, no character pausing the climax to explain the audience's complicity in systemic injustice. It is a cartoon about a sad boy and his busy dad. On the scale of modern cultural instruction, it is nearly inert, and it seems perfectly happy there.