Naruto Shippuden the Movie (2007)

The fourth entry in a film series that has outlasted most of its contemporaries, Naruto Shippuden the Movie arrives with the confidence of a franchise that knows precisely what it is selling: ninjas, a demon, a prophecy, and a great deal of punching. A priestess named Shion can seal the demon Mōryō and foresee the deaths of others, and she has foreseen Naruto's. He resolves to defy fate. That is the entire engine of the picture, and it runs without a single glance toward the cultural preoccupations of the present day. The cast is uniformly Japanese, the world is a fictional one, and nobody pauses to interrogate the politics of anything.

Shion is a capable and headstrong young woman who eventually fights alongside the hero, and Sakura, Lee, and Neji all get their moments. None of this amounts to a statement about gender. Her arc concludes with a marriage proposal wrapped in a double entendre about continuing the priestess bloodline, a romantic convention and not a manifesto. The film's themes, such as they are, concern fate, sacrifice, and the dark thoughts of mankind that birth demons. These arrive through chakra creatures and spinning spheres of energy, never through a lecture. There is no racial commentary in a story about a hidden village of ninjas, no environmental parable in a stone army, and no economic critique in a demon who wants a thousand year kingdom.

What remains is a competent action film with a darker palette than its predecessors and a genuinely surprising opening funeral. It is well animated, brisk, and entirely of its time and place, which is to say 2007 and Japan. For a certain viewer it is comfort food. For the sommelier of social consciousness, it is a vintage that has not been cellared at all. There is nothing to decant here. The bottle is sealed, and the label says shounen.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}