Naruto SD (Rock Lee) : First Impressions

April 4th, 2012 in Anime, General Reviews, Naruto SD: Rock Lee by

Ever had an experience where you decided to try something new and well after all said and done you think to yourself, “sigh, that was a waste of the last 23.5 minutes of my life”. Well that was exactly how I felt after episode 1 of this thing, true I not the biggest chibi fan out there but having chibi animation doesn’t give a show the leeway to create something completly ridiculous. Okay… maybe it does (  😯 ‘LEEway’ … rock-‘LEE’ )

To those who are familiar with the original Naruto (and I’m sure all of us are) you will notice that they tried to keep the personalities of each character intact (key word here ‘tried’) and while the entire show seems like it’s going to be a spin-off of the very worst filler episodes, I will give them that because of the extremely lighthearted feel it radiates they have the potential to actually be…. funny. For example medium awareness seems to be a very prominent factor in these episodes “he is also the main character of the main Naruto TV show”, “Do we even have electricity and gas in this world?”. There is also bad guys who, well apart from the part that its practically impossible to make a chibi look evil we have them on the level where they can say in response to Rock lee pulling down the leader’s pants “if we’re just gonna get embarassed like this, we’re never comming to this house again”.

One last thing I can’t figure about this show though, where in the main series does its timeline take place, because while Naruto has abilities like multi-rasengan and Tsunade’s face is already engraved on the Hokage’s mountainside memorial thing, both which imply Shippuden. Rock lee seems to have regressed back to early Naruto days when it comes to his abilities. Maybe this was done to boost the entertainment factor but we’ll just have to wait till episode 2 to see.

To be honest while the concept of this show is great (ninja comedy, thats new… right?) I feel it’s going to make the average fan of Naruto a tad bit disappointed but hey, I feel that i’m somewhat biased against this as light comical shows are hardly ever my thing and chibi’s well… lets just say i’ve had one or two scrubs with my die-hard chibi friends.

Overall, I suppose I should be unbiased and give it a 6.8/10. Don’t think I’m being fair? well bearing in mind that I gave naruto 6.5/10 and Naruto Shippuden 7/10 and I still call myself a Naruto Fan, I’d say its score is pretty good.