Naruto: Harry Potter with Ninjas

The popular anime series Naruto is, perhaps, a tribute to the influence of J.K. Rowling's internationally popular Harry Potter series. In both series, the hero has a mark on his body that represents an evil entity that empowers him while it also causes him some torment. He is an orphan. He is a boy with extraordinary potential for power. He doesn't listen to authority figures and is often belligerent and rude. He finds himself in a sort of love triangle with his two closest friends. Of course, these two series have many differences as well, but Naruto, much like Harry Potter, creates a fantasy world and focuses largely on the special education of a group of teenagers within that world. Though Naruto's world is inhabited by ninjas, these ninjas have powers much like the wizards of the Harry Potter universe. Naruto began its life as a manga series, written a couple of years after Rowling began the Harry Potter series. Both worlds share a lightheartedness, but also aren't afraid of delving into darker territory. Naruto, at its best, is a joy to watch, just as Harry Potter is a joy to read.

The show is currently available on Netflix Instant Watch, and it comprises of four seasons and 220 episodes. It is available only in Japanese with subtitles, but the Japanese voice actors are much better than the English ones, in my opinion. I would recommend only the first three seasons, however, as the final season is made up entirely of filler episodes that have nothing to do with the main story, and they are mostly not very good. The conclusion of the final season also steals the spotlight from Naruto and moves it onto a less deserving character, which left me frustrated.

Other than this, Naruto is a remarkable show, with engaging characters and fight scenes that, surprisingly, are not boring. Part of the joy comes from the main character himself, Naruto Uzumaki. He is impatient, arrogant, and bull-headed, and often at odds with classmates and adults, and this leads to some very comical moments. However, he is also caring and makes close friends with some of his classmates, such as Sakura and Sasuke (who is also his rival). Naruto begins life as an inept ninja, but gradually learns lessons along the way. Sometimes, frustratingly, these lessons are forgotten and thus his growth is made to be just an illusion, but when he does grow stronger the moment is exhilarating. While these details make it sound like many other anime shows out there, the storytelling of Naruto is superior.

The opening describes a beast called the Nine-Tailed Fox, which once terrorized the Leaf Village. This beast is sealed in the belly of a child, Naruto, by the Fourth Hokage, who dies as a result. This fusion of the demon fox with Naruto creates a powerful energy force within him that, if he learns how to harness it, he can use to make himself incredibly strong. It also makes him an outcast in the village. Some despise him for serving as a reminder of the sacrifice of the Fourth Hokage, and some fear him for having the powerful beast sealed inside him. He befriends Sasuke Uchiha, another loner who has a power called Sharingan passed down his family lines. Sasuke is destined to be one of the most powerful ninjas of his class, but he, unlike Naruto, despises the attention of his classmates. We learn later that Sasuke's family suffered a horrible tragedy at the hands of his older brother, Itachi, and Sasuke vows vengeance. A third character, Sakura, also befriends the two, and the obligatory love triangle pops up: Sakura loves Sasuke, Sasuke could care less, Naruto loves Sakura, and Sakura doesn't want attention from a loser. There are plenty of other characters, all of them with unique character traits, traits that run deeper than appearance or a simple habit that distinguishes them, and this is part of the joy of Naruto. Its world is populated with very interesting, complex, and varied characters.

Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura are partnered and placed under the mentorship of Kakashi Sensei, a copy ninja who also has the Sharingan ability, though to a lesser extent than Sasuke. Kakashi's aloofness creates for some funny situations, and his contrast with another mentor ninja, Guy Sensei, who takes himself very seriously, makes for even more funny moments. Kakashi trains his three students, and it is clear early on that Naruto is the least gifted of them, mainly due to his recklessness. Perhaps my favorite part of the series is the quest to hunt down an assassin who uses powers of the mist. The scenes are exciting because the characters have human qualities. Too many anime shows feature smug main heroes with incredible power and little to no humanity. In Naruto's first encounter with bad guys, his fear freezes him. Despite all he has trained for, he can't act. Neither can Sakura. Only Sasuke keeps a cool head, already having experienced violence in such a way Naruto and the others can't imagine. The battle with the mist assassin itself is exciting. The battles are more chess match than hack and slash. Each ninja makes a move that bests the move performed by the other. Each attack and each defense, every power used, has a strategy behind it, and the payoff comes after this strategy is revealed. None of the later fight scenes duplicate this process as well as the fight with the mist assassin, though they're not without their excitement.

The show provides some very compelling villains as well. Orochimaru (pictured above left), one of the three Legendary Sannin (a distinction given to the most powerful ninjas), was a Leaf shinobi, a very talented one, whose mind was driven by absolute power. His philosophy to power is to learn every skill he can, even those forbidden to shinobi to use, and he commits unforgivable acts in the process. Orochimaru is a terrifying villain and one of the most effective characters in the show. He thirsts for Sasuke because Sasuke's Sharingan ability would increase his own power greatly. Another compelling villain is Gaara of the desert (pictured above right). Gaara comes from the Sand village, and he has a powerful demon residing within him, like Naruto, except his demon has a horrible influence over him, unlike Naruto's. We first meet Gaara when ninjas from all of the lands gather in the Leaf village for a competition that allows the young Genin ninjas to become the next ninja rank: Chunin. While Gaara is frightening at first, the show unfortunately feels the need to explain how he came to be who he is through flashbacks, and it attempts to convince us he is haunted by these past occurrences. This leads to an unconvincing change in Gaara from villain to hero later on, and Gaara, by series end, steals the show from Naruto. Other prominent villains, who make only a brief appearance, are Itachi Uchiha and his organization, the Akatsuki, which seek the Nine-Tailed Fox within Naruto. Like with Orochimaru, the show fortunately does not describe why Itachi is so evil, but some back story involving an evil act he committed serves to provide psychological turmoil for Sasuke, his younger brother. The show does not develop the Akatsuki plot line very far, however, perhaps desiring to keep it for the next series, Naruto: Shippuden, unseen by me.

Another important character I should mention is Jiraiya, the second of the three Sannin. He is a comical character, though not entirely original. He is a lecher who likes to gamble, drink, and shirk his duties. Fans of Dragon Ball will likely recognize Master Roche in this description, though I think Jiraiya is more likeable. He is a master of toads, and one of his first lessons is to teach Naruto how to summon a very powerful toad. His methods try Naruto's patience, but they're ultimately effective, if questionable. He flings Naruto off a cliff in the hopes it will inspire him to summon the large toad. It works, to Naruto's surprise and delight, but Jiraiya leaves the difficult task of taming the toad to his pupil. Jiraiya adds some fun to the show, but some of the scenes involving him and Naruto are creepy. Naruto has an ability, used mainly as a prank, to transform himself into a naked woman, with her naked parts covered by clouds. As Jiraiya has an uncontrollable fondness for beautiful women, Naruto uses this power to influence his master, who finds the transformation very seductive. The thought of pedophilia never seems to have entered into the minds of the show's creators, either that or the Japanese just have a strange sense of humor.

As I've stated, the show suffers from too many filler episodes. Flashbacks are repeated far too many times, some of the fight scenes drag on, and the side stories later on have no connection with the main story. You will find a few entertaining filler episodes, such as one about postal ninjas and another about a strange creature that clings to Naruto's back. I also have a problem with anime aimed at young adults in their use of what I call pity parties. These generally involve a character recalling a terrible incident and reeling in melodramatic anguish. Or we find a character who believes him or herself undeserving of rescue and asking the noble hero, usually a male, "Why me?" These are obviously meant to tug on the heartstrings, and they are so obvious as to be insulting. Naruto, fortunately, does not use these pity parties to the extent that other anime shows do, some to such an extent as to drown in them.

Another weakness of the show is its use of women. With an exception of the third Sannin, Lady Tsunade (pictured below), the female shinobi are inferior to the men. Sakura (pictured left), for one, is a dull character who is unable to grow as strong as Naruto or Sasuke, and she ends up feeling sorry for herself. During a tournament between the ninjas, she fights her best friend, another girl, which is the least exciting and least interesting of the fights. I could imagine the spectators yawning, as neither girl had the extraordinary powers of the other ninjas. Her sole purpose, it seems, is to be in love with Sasuke and to be an object of desire for Naruto. Even in those episodes that promise tremendous growth for Sakura nothing very extraordinary happens. This is a problem with many anime shows aimed at young adults. Girls are made to be desirable even by the audience, and their fragile nature serves to make them more desirable because we pity them and feel an instinct to reach out and help.

Still, Naruto towers above many other anime shows largely in its character development and storytelling. Each character is a joy to watch in his or her own way. The show is very creative, and its actions scenes are entertaining. You will be surprised by its depth and how much detail goes into the creation of its world. Had the show been shorter, by about 100 episodes, it would have been just about perfect, but as it stands it is superb. Very few shows touch it at its best, but it's such a shame that so much of it is not worth watching.

The Book that Took Forty Years to Write

Cecilia Valdes

By Cirilo Villaverde

Though it may be Cuba's counterpart to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Cecilia Valdes nonetheless stands apart as its own work with its own agendas. More than forty years after publishing Cecilia Valdes as a short story, Cirilo Villaverde, in 1882, published it as a novel - a very large novel. Villaverde confesses that the length of time it took to finish the novel, including how little he could dedicate to it at extended periods of time, accounts for the novel's unevenness, which includes long stretches of unnecessary detail and other such disruptive passages. Most disruptive of all is the one hundred page trip to a Cuban slave plantation, which damages the novel beyond repair. One has to wonder how much better the novel could have been, had Villaverde had the chance to write this novel without interruption (he faced many political conflicts, which led to his exile to the United States). This isn't to say it's not a great novel, in many ways it is, but it's not, in the end, a successful novel. The fatal flaw, as I've already said, is the lengthy scene, three hundred pages in, at the plantation. The novel never recovers from it. Wikipedia describes the ending accurately: "as if [the] author h[ad] lost interest in his story and wanted to finish it as fast as possible." For scholars on slavery and race, Cecilia Valdes is a crucial read, but for the rest of us, it just breaks our hearts to see the novel crumble before our eyes.

Does that mean you shouldn't read it? No. As a matter of fact this novel does many things very well. You could even say that an excellent book was ruined by one hundred pages of poor writing, but those first three hundred pages aren't any worse for it. The book's downfall, it seems, can easily be explained by Villaverde's politics. While the book is essentially an anti-slavery novel, it is only in a very complicated way. For one, the novel provides hints that, though Villaverde may have truly been against slavery, he was nonetheless a racist. His stance against slavery was owing to the fact that abolishing slavery would abolish Spanish rule in Cuba, which is what Villaverde wanted. There is evidence that he was pro-slavery up until he learned that slavery was what kept Spain in Cuba, and it is at this point I imagine he decided to take the anti-slavery route that Stowe made very popular. Three hundred pages into the writing of his book he decides to insert an agenda that turns out to be ruinous.

But first I want to show why these ruinous pages are so heartbreaking.

Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Proslavery Adventure

The Musical

*Spoilers aplenty--I will discuss the entire movie

In 1977, the beloved Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls came out in their own animated musical adventure, directed by Richard Williams. Beneath the innocent facade of Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure lie some rather dark themes. I think it's enough to say that, had this movie been released two-hundred years ago (imagining there were movies that far back), we would be viewing it through a much different lens. The images and dialogue of the movie conjure themes of slavery, suicide, and eroticism. Perhaps this is accidental on the part of the director, but it's too pervasive, too well conceived to ignore.

Raggedy Ann and Andy takes up a concept that was later made popular in Pixar's first full-length film, Toy Story. This concept, of course, involves toys coming to life when their owners are absent. While this is a very imaginative idea, I don't believe the implications of staging what turn out to be living, rational beings as pieces of property has been widely considered, if at all. I'm talking about implications of slavery. In Toy Story, favorite toys are branded with the first letter of their owner's name, they oversee the working order of the toys in the absence of said owner, and they come face-to-face with one cruel toy owner no toy wants to be sold to. Toys are, in many ways, the perfect symbol for slaves. In the eyes of their owners, they're nothing but hunks of plastic incapable of intellectual or rational thought. But when these human owners leave the room the toys come to life and speak and behave intelligently. To compare, slave-owners viewed Africans as brutes who lacked the requisite degrees of humanity to make them equal to their white owners. It was simply unthinkable that the slave could have the intellectual capacities to plan a revolution, much less a successful one, and inconceivable, as well, that they would even want to revolt. However, the slaves did plan revolts, but only when their owners weren't looking. The most successful one was the Haitian Revolution, during which the black slaves wrestled Haiti, formerly St. Domingue, from the French. Toy Story, as well, stages a revolution, in escaping the maniacal and cruel Sid, and the toys use to their advantage that Sid couldn't conceive of them being able to act on their own.

The little girl who owns Raggedy Ann, Marcella, falls somewhere between toy owners Andy and Sid. She's more like a clueless, less sadistic version of the latter, in carrying Raggedy Ann by the ankle and letting her head knock against the stairs. And after one look at the toys in her bedroom you might be inclined to think she's walked into Sid's bedroom. Why a little girl would own such toys is beyond me. Raggedy Ann has a privileged position among Marcella's toys. Not only was she taken on a journey into the outside world, but she receives a seat on a chair that elevates her above the other toys. Raggedy Ann is something of a leader character, and this becomes more apparent when the toys become animated. All the toys gather around Raggedy Ann as she tells of her adventures with Marcella, hardly distressed that the bumps to her head require stitches. The stitching is done not by a human, but a large woman doll reminiscent of an Aunt Chloe or Aunt Jemina figure (the harmless, family-oriented slave). The toys are all happy despite Raggedy Ann's beating. It's like the myth of the submissive slave, which states that blacks are naturally submissive, thus naturally composed for slavery. Raggedy Ann and company offer evidence that this myth is true. But, wait! They're toys...