jameson13 - 2013-06-07 19:22:00

I would like to firstly state that I have not watched the Naruto series. This means that I'm judging this movie solely on what I saw and not in light to the series.

Story
The story seemed simple enough and somewhat expected. It was a mission and that's all there was to it, arguably some would say that it's too simple. I would say it's fitting and although it is nothing special, I have to say that I am a sucker for simplicity and personally it kept me interested enough to continue watching.

Art
I found the art nice; the backgrounds and characters, whilst they were nothing special I found them to be fitting. The colour palette used for some parts was quite nice however, it should be mentioned that, as you can probably tell from the title that majority of this movie takes place in a snowy/icy area. My point here is that it was for the most part a depressing and boring colour palette.The animation is really good, you can't really tell for the most part but during the action scenes it really shines, although you have to remember, it is a movie, so it would be safe to assume it had high production values; so this quality was expected.

Sound
The music was mostly unnoticeable until action scenes, where even then it wasn't really anything special but, it got the job done and hinges with what was going on quite well. Oh also the ending song that played when the credits rolled was nice, nothing special at all but nice nonetheless.The Japanese dub was okay, I wouldn't say there were many notable roles apart from Naruto himself. I think that his voice actor did a very good job at portraying the kind of character he is (from what I know).I have yet to watch the English dub.

Characters
I feel that this was definitely a weak point of the movie. It felt like the only characters of significance were Naruto and the actress. Any supporting characters felt insignificant and to be completely honest with you the 'Villain', if he should even be called that, had about ten minutes of screen time. Naruto seemed like your average shounen lead, he's: always excited, not particularly smart, has a good moral alignment (You're doing bad things, I must stop you) and supposedly has something special about him that separates him from the rest of the characters.These kind of characters are love or hate, depending on your preference you may find this movie unbearable, or kind of enjoy it.The actress, Yukie Fujikaze, remained mostly unlikeable throughout the entire movie, it felt like she was clinically depressed and pessimistic throughout; Naruto has some sort of unconditional and unrequited love for her in this movie.

Enjoyment
I found this movie to be somewhat enjoyable. The action was good, the rest was boring and generally felt really slow paced.

Overall
Overall I'd say this movie left a decent enough impression of Naruto on me and I will consider starting on the series sometime in the future because of it; watch this if you have a permissive attitude towards shounen anime.

Thanks for reading!