TRAILER: Cinema Release: Chico & Rita

Film: Chico & Rita

NEWS: Cinema Release: Chico & Rita

Cuba, 1948. Chico is a young piano player with big dreams. Rita is a beautiful singer with an extraordinary voice. Music and romantic desire unites them, but their journey – in the tradition of the Latin ballad, the bolero – brings heartache and torment.

From Havana to New York, Paris, Hollywood and Las Vegas, two passionate individuals battle impossible odds to unite in music and love.

Film: Chico & Rita
Release date: 19th November 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 94 mins
Director: Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal, Tono Errando
Starring: Limara Meneses, Emar Xor Oña, Mario Guerra, Estrella Morente
Genre: Animation
Studio: CinemaNX
Format: Cinema
Country: Spain/UK

REVIEW: DVD Release: Dougal And The Blue Cat

Film: Dougal And The Blue Cat
Release date: 1st November 2010
Certificate: U
Running time: 79 mins
Director: Serge Danot
Starring: Christian Riehl, Paul Bisciglia, Nadine Legrand, Jean-Luc Tardieu
Genre: Animation
Studio: Second Sight
Format: DVD
Country: France

Created by stop-motion animator Serge Danot, The Magic Roundabout was initially a French TV series for children. Only after the BBC bought the series in 1965, and enlisted Play School regular Eric Thompson to transform the programme, did it cast its spell over the rest of the world. With Thompson throwing away the French scripts and writing new ones, with all-new dialogue and quintessential characters, it was hard to imagine the series without our beloved Dougal, Florence et al. With the release of Dougal And The Blue Cat, including the original French version, Pollux And The Blue Cat, we are finally able to compare these two fascinating feature-lengths.


Pollux And The Blue Cat (1970)
Pollux the dog, troubled by an eerie dream, is further dismayed by the arrival of a blue cat to the Beautiful Wood. While the Wood’s other residents try to welcome him, the ever-suspicious Pollux is watching his every move.

When the blue cat ventures into the forbidden part of the Beautiful Wood, things take a turn for the worse. Unknown to Pollux and the rest of his friends, the cat has begun his quest to take over their beloved home, turning it entirely blue with the aid of the ‘blue voice’ and an abandoned factory housing an army to destroy all that isn’t.

Pollux will need to regain the trust of his friends if he is to rescue them from imprisonment and restore the Beautiful Wood to its former flamboyant glories…


Dougal And The Blue Cat (1972)
Dougal, troubled by a terrifying noise during the night, seeks answers from his friends Zebedee and Florence, whom are unable to help, distracted instead by the new arrival in the Magic Garden – a blue cat called Buxton.

While the Garden’s other residents welcome him, the ever-suspicious Dougal is watching his every move, and when Buxton is spotted talking to a mysterious ‘blue voice’ before entering a derelict factory on the outskirts of their world, things unsurprisingly take a turn for the worse.

Unknown to Dougal and the rest of his friends, Buxton has begun his quest to take over the Magic Garden, turning it entirely blue with the aid of the ‘blue voice’ and an army to destroy all that isn’t.

Dougal will need to regain the trust of his friends if he is to rescue them from imprisonment and restore the Garden to its former flamboyant glories…


If Eric Thompson really did tear up the scripts to the French version of The Magic Roundabout and create his own plots, he shared a spookily similar vision to Danot’s, as both versions are almost identical in ways of storyline. His daughter, actress Emma Thompson, to this day insists that her father would watch reels of soundless footage, conjuring up quirky stories for the television series, and this may be true, but to get a feature-length almost spot on seems all too coincidental.

Having said that, out of the two on show here, Danot’s Pollux And The Blue Cat is the more polished, and understandably so, with fabulously quirky ditties complementing the story rather than hindering it - even if Florence’s heart-breaking final song in Thompson’s adaptation is by far the best of the whole bunch.

Pollux is most definitely aimed primarily at children – its characters are more child-friendly and stereotypical. Pollux is a dog that dislikes cats, Ambroise is a cow that just wants to eat grass (lots of it), while Flappy the bunny is lazy, pure and simple. There are no sneaky drug references or political sideswipes aimed predominantly at the student audience of Thompson’s version, and forgiving the racist tones of a narrow-sighted Chinese impersonation that appears in both, every character is straightforward, and perhaps more boring because of it.

What is surprising, then, is just how creepy Danot’s creation actually is. Only twice during Dougal And The Blue Cat do the hairs stand up on the back of the neck: firstly, when Dougal confronts the spectacularly creepy noise disrupting his sleep, and secondly, when Buxton enters the nightmare room during his quest to become king – the sinister soundtrack supporting the odd, angular, almost German-expressionist visuals.

In Pollux And The Blue Cat, the spooky noise is replaced by a dull mechanical one, yet the factory in the forbidden part of the wood is fantastically used to make whips for hitting children. Only on discovering this does the mad army that captures the inhabitants of the wood make any sense – they are whips, something not made clear either by the visuals or by Thompson’s interpretation.

It doesn’t end with the whips, though. Danot doesn’t need a creepy score in the nightmare room to create fear, as the blue cat and the blue voice already conjure enough with their threatening powers of articulation. Then there is the sixth room in the factory, the one where they make the whips to hurt the flowers and the children of the beautiful wood, and an assault on its community that will see mostly younger viewers reach for a cushion or two.

Thompson wins brownie points for turning Danot’s 'storeroom of sugar' challenge into a torture chamber unfit for the salivating Dougal to try and negotiate, but, for the most part, Pollux And The Blue Cat is a far more intriguing and coherent piece of storytelling.

Yet Eric Thompson manages to give each character a unique charm, by now adored by millions - it’s not hard to see why the series, and this film, is cherished by so many. With wonderful one-liners such as “What a place, worse than Barnsley,” “Do you come here often?” and “Remember you’re British!” Thompson was able to connect with both children and adults alike, helped in no small way by political commentary, references to current affairs and nods to other British institutions (Dougal dyes his fur blue and calls himself Blue Peter in order to infiltrate Buxton’s blue factory unnoticed).

Pollux isn’t without its humorous moments either: “Thank god there’s a dark side - much less to paint” is uttered during a trip to the moon to paint it blue. “We have no gutters in the Beautiful Wood,” comments Pollux on meeting the blue cat for the first time, and the clever “She’ll be black and blue” line delivered in the final moments to instigate more dog versus cat violence.

Combined with Danot’s charming animation, both versions are feasts for the eyes, regardless of age or nationality, and although short on running time, with a plodding introduction Thompson struggles to fill, the transition from five-minutes to feature-length is made with considerable ease.


Dougal And The Blue Cat is a wonderful achievement, blessed with wonderful characters and light-heartedness that will appeal to all ages. But ignore Pollux at your peril. Darker, more coherent and just as witty, Danot’s version is actually superior, making this DVD an essential purchase - and an absolute treat. DW

REVIEW: DVD Release: A Town Called Panic

Film: A Town Called Panic
Release date: 22nd November 2010
Certificate: PG
Running time: 78 mins
Director: Stephane Aubier & Vincent Patar
Starring: Stephane Aubier, Jeanne Balibar, Nicolas Buysse, Véronique Dumont, Bruce Ellison
Genre: Animation
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: Belgium/Luxembourg/France

A spin-off of the Aardman Animation backed series of shorts produced in Belgium, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar’s French-language film version of A Town Called Panic is just as memorable and bizarre as its TV progenitor. The film is as low budget as they come, yet the lovingly created herky-jerky stop motion animation shines through the miniature plastic and papier mache backgrounds to create something quite unique.

The surreal plot (such as it is) of A Town Called Panic follows the comedic mishaps and calamities in the lives of a horse named Horse (Vincent Patar), a cowboy named Cowboy (Bruce Ellison) and an indian named, you guessed it, Indian (Stéphane Aubier).

Attempting to surprise the fairly sensible Horse for his birthday, dim-witted Cowboy and Indian attempt to surprise their equine friend by ordering exactly fifty bricks to build a barbeque. The only problem is that through a mishap in their online order, fifty-million bricks are ordered instead, where subsequently Horse and co’s house is flattened due to a stack of bricks being placed on the roof.

This kicks off a chain of events that sees the lo-fi animated trio go on a series of oddball adventures, ranging from freefalling towards the centre of the earth to being held hostage inside a giant snowball-firing mechanical penguin in a snow covered landscape, and chasing a family of underwater dwelling creatures who have built a house from the stolen walls of the three friends…


The biggest part of A Town Called Panic’s charm lies in its deliberately low-budget and rough around the edges appearance. In many instances, the plastic toy characters waddle along on a flat toy stand which keeps them upright (most comical in the cases of Cowboy and Indian). Indeed, the lo-fi charm of the whole painstaking stop motion production process is evocative of Aardman produced classics such as Wallace & Gromit (even if a little more crudely produced), so it’s no surprise that the company distributed the original television series preceding this feature-length version. The clever homemade ingenuity of directors Aubier and Patar (makers of the similarly styled Cravendale milk ads) is unmistakably present throughout the film, with the plastic and papier mache made miniature sets adding to the surrealism of the whole story.

As the brilliant animators at Pixar know well, there is great humour to be found in the interactions between toys brought to life. Except in A Town Called Panic these toy figures also live in a wacky world suiting their off-the-wall characters, where a horse can read a newspaper and drive a rickety car and a cowboy and indian can make online internet orders for fifty-million bricks. The central relationship between the toy trio is strangely endearing and hilarious, where Horse often plays the straight man (so to speak) to Cowboy and Indian’s often annoying, shouty stupidity.

The bizarre events that the friends go through are often frenetic in pace, and, as such, the 78 minute runtime seems to fly past from sequence to sequence. This means that what there is of a plot can often be confusing and hard to keep up with as a result; where one moment the toys are falling towards the centre of the earth and the next are landed in a desolate snowscape populated by animatronic giant penguins and angry mammoths.

However, Aubier and Patar never cease to make these events anything less than highly entertaining through the ingenious low budget visuals employed, particularly in the snow and water scenes (in addition to the fact that seeing a horse swimming underwater wearing a snorkel is just intrinsically funny). Indeed, the seemingly random and chaotic sequences of fantastic events that occur merely add to the film’s huge sense of fun. For instance, in one scene, in the underwater section, Cowboy, Indian and Horse pretend to be Santa and his helpers to lure the water people into a trap in order to retrieve back the walls for their house. The colours and actions of the animated characters are extremely well animated here, where the animators’ creativity shines through the obvious low-budget necessities. The fast pace and surrealism of events is perhaps even more admirable an achievement by Aubier and Patar when considering the notoriously laborious and time-consuming nature of stop motion animation.

The voice cast (including Aubier and Patar themselves) add a lot to the onscreen characters, from Cowboy and Indian’s high-pitched panicked chatter to the calmly seductive voice of Horse’s equine love interest Madame Longrée (Jeanne Balibar). The French voice cast is universally excellent, yet it is perhaps the voice of Steven (Benoit Poelvoorde) the next door neighbour of the main trio who steals the show with his permanently angry persona. This makes a scene where the underwater people invade his house even more comical, where the rapidly cried line “Oh no! My farm!” is bound to invoke at least a chuckle from the hardiest of souls.


A home-made slice of stop motion brilliance, A Town Called Panic is nothing more than 78 minutes of ingeniously produced joy. Perhaps a longer running time would be too much in the crazy world of Horse and friends, although the film is bound to raise laughs if only out of its sheer madcap inventiveness. DB

SPECIAL FEATURE: DVD Review: The Secret Of Kells

Film: The Secret Of Kells
Release date: 1st November 2010
Certificate: PG
Running time: 75 mins
Director: Tomm Moore, Nora Twomey
Starring: Venise du Bois du Roy, Brendan Gleeson, Liam Hourican, Mick Lally, Michael McGrath
Genre: Animation
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: France/Belgium/Republic Of Ireland

This is an English-Language release.

Up, Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess And The Frog and The Secret Of Kells. One of the nominees for 2010’s Best Animated Feature Oscar stood out from the rest as being a little anonymous. Without the clout of Disney, Pixar, Wes Anderson or Henry Selick to push it into the limelight, Kells didn’t really stand much of a chance. Which is a shame, because it’s brilliant.

In 19th century Ireland, Brendan, a young boy and apprentice Illuminator (calligrapher) is torn between his love of books and his uncle’s wish for him to follow in his footsteps as Abbot of Kells. When the legendary Brother Aidan arrives with the coveted Book of Iona after Vikings take his monastery, Brendan must decide whether dream or duty will occupy his future.

The Vikings, meanwhile, are tearing through Ireland, and Abbot Cellach is now obsessed with finishing construction of a huge wall around the Abbey, despite Aidan’s warning him it will not be enough to prevent an attack.

As Aidan takes Brendan under his wing and teaches him the art of Illumination, Brendan is introduced to a world outside the Abbey walls, hitherto forbidden to him by his uncle. He meets Aisling, the last Faerie in the forest, and becomes aware that a world of fantasy and danger exists beyond his dreams…


A Belgian/Irish/French co-production; The Secret Of Kells is as spiritual, arty and downright weird as that suggests. The whole thing has a dreamlike quality that exacerbates its mythological influences. Check out the scene in which Brendan fights a dragon underwater. Is it magic? Is it a dream? Who knows? The two concepts aren’t mutually exclusive if one’s mind is open to either possibility. In fact, that seems to essentially be the theme running through the film.

Abbot Cellach, himself a former Illuminator, has lost the ability to dream. His responsibility to his people has sapped his imagination and all he thinks about is protecting the Abbey. Because of this, he has condemned Brendan to a life of servitude and boredom. Brother Aidan’s arrival opens up a whole new world for Brendan, and he relishes his chance to learn how to express himself in a way he never thought possible.

The relationships here are played well, and no-one is portrayed in an unsympathetic way, even though it would have been easy to draw the Abbot as a closed-minded villain (although, in a literal sense, he is designed to look exactly like a villain, a mix between Aladdin’s Jafar and Star Wars’ Count Dooku). On the other hand, the villainous Vikings are not given much screen time, and are portrayed simply as an oncoming malevolent force. This doesn’t give much in the way of motivation and character, but is ultimately successful come the ferocious attack.

It is when on the outside of the wall, in the outlying forest, that the film really comes alive. The imagination of Brendan (and indeed, the filmmakers) is unleashed with stunning realisation. The aforementioned fight with a dragon is a highlight, but any moment where Aisling is around is bound to stir up some kind of visual mischief. The sequence where she sings a cat into a ghost to get Brendan out of his bedroom is probably the most tripped out moment since Dumbo got drunk (read that sentence again after watching the film and you’ll understand, possibly).

Where the film falls down is in the last ten or fifteen minutes. Brendan’s escape and eventual return is somewhat rushed and anticlimactic. It could be argued that art is more about the creation than the finished product, so Brendan’s journey is more important than his destination. And after an amount of ponderous chin stroking, the ending doesn’t really tarnish the film in any noticeable way. Moreover, it’s hard to suggest an alternative way to end, as all story-arcs seem to be tied up quite nicely (although the Vikings didn’t seem to be very thorough in their work). So, it’s a futile complaint, really.


An astonishing piece of work that evokes memories of childhood imagination just as well as more celebrated works such as Coraline. It will likely never be as well known though. So spread the word, this is one secret that shouldn’t be kept. SEAN

REVIEW: DVD Release: Waltz With Bashir

Film: Waltz With Bashir
Release date: 30th March 2009
Certificate: 18
Running time: 87 mins
Director: Ari Folman
Starring: Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Ari Folman, Shmuel Frenkel, Dror Harazi
Genre: Animation
Studio: Artificial Eye
Format: DVD
Country: Israel/France/Germany/USA/Finland/Switzerland/Belgium/Australia

Waltz With Bashir is Ari Folman’s 2008 adult animation based on the political corruption of Lebanon. Distressing chronicles of the 1982 war in Beirut are magnified by the fact that the film is based on the director’s own experiences - the cartoon visuals serving to make the facts more digestible.

The film opens to a gang of fearless dogs, vicious and steadily raging through a city dowsed in morosely animated colours of grey and yellow. This is the troubled dream of army war veteran Boaz Rein-Biskila; a dream which took twenty years to form itself following the horrific events of the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

Protagonist Ari Folman discusses the dream with its owner, only to suddenly realise that any memories of the event that he also witnessed are absent from his mind. He is not suffering from amnesia, he is not sick; he has simply unveiled an area of grey cloud within his brain. And so the film’s concept begins, following Folman as he goes on to converse with characters with which he had shared his war experiences, attempting to piece together this broken mental jigsaw…


Folman’s interviewees are a mismatched assortment of middle-aged characters, all with different experiences to share, different emotions to feel, but with a common focal point: the Lebanon massacre of 1982. We meet Carmi Cnaa’n, a cannabis-smoking falafel vendor who now lives in Holland. We meet Folman’s psychologist friend, who casts a philosophical light on this troubling lack of memory. We meet people who could just as easily be our own friends trying to solve our own problems with their barefaced storytelling of intensely personal mental excerpts.

Folman nonchalantly ponders whether he was 100, 200 or 300 yards from the massacre. He goes back into his 19-year-old self and cautiously wanders the streets of Beirut alongside punks and the scent of death. A tank of soldiers laugh and joke as they draw towards a site riddled with soldiers and guns. Their amusement is harshly slaughtered as the commander receives a bullet to the face, pushing the film’s atmosphere from cheery camaraderie down into frantic terror and the heartbreaking loyalty associated with team survival attempts. These pieces of the grand memory puzzle are slowly collected to form a frosted picture of despair and terror, relieved only occasionally by subtle moments of humour – such as the amusing reconstruction of an animated porn video on a television.

The title itself is drawn from one instance during the battle, where a soldier named Shmuel Frenkel performs an intricate dance with his machine-gun amidst a rain of enemy fire, musically accompanied by Chopin’s Waltz #6. He glides delicately beneath a poster of Bashir Gemayel, the Lebanese Phalangist leader and Israeli ally. The entire construction of this scene is fundamentally disturbing, with the audio choice and the elegance depicted in the most inappropriate of places – a combination of classical piano in conjunction with certain death is never intended to have a comforting effect.

Surprisingly, the film undeniably intends to portray the Israeli soldiers as the victims more so than the civilians - highlighted perfectly by the scene where Folman watches a crowd of screaming, faceless Palestinian women. The voices of the women are slowly drained out; leaving the shot focused on Folman’s distressed facial expression and loud, shallow breathing, as he struggles to cope with the emotional impact of the situation. Throughout the film, all Palestinians are seen only as dead or indistinct beings, merely objects alongside the constantly dynamic soldiers.

The cinematography is visually similar to the rotoscope animation techniques used by Richard Linklater in A Scanner Darkly. In actual fact, the film’s graphics are loyal to its homeland, as its aesthetic design is a method invented by Israeli ilustrator Yoni Goodman. This haunting cartoon version of reality is created using Adobe Flash cutouts, and the additional use of muted colour palettes makes for very sombre viewing.

Waltz With Bashir is a cathartic journey with an impressive collection of award wins and nominations. The monotonous Hebrew is detached from the film by the requirement for subtitles, accentuating the graphic quality and allowing the pictures to speak for themselves like subdued segments of foreign news recordings. The memories built up over the course of the film are surely too much for one person to contain. At the beginning, Folman was unsettled by his inability to remember an incident of such magnitude. At the end, he apparently regains his mind as the film suddenly cuts to genuine video footage of the war - footage that he will find impossible to forget.


Perhaps the animated nature of the film lures you into a false sense of security, for even a rabid dog or a dead child can never be as horrific as its lifelike replica. Or perhaps this is worse, as Waltz With Bashir conceals murder and distress inside beautifully directed images to the point where sadness simply becomes artful cinema instead of an actual emotion. But while it is technically just a cartoon, it is also much more than that. Waltz With Bashir is something profound; it is something that speaks with gritty wisdom, something that cries real tears. NM

NEWS: Cinema Release: A Town Called Panic

Animated plastic toys like Cowboy, Indian and Horse have problems, too.

Cowboy and Indian's plan to surprise Horse with a homemade birthday gift backfires when they destroy his house instead. Surreal adventures ensue as the trio travel to the centre of the earth, trek across frozen tundra and discover a parallel underwater universe where pointy headed (and dishonest!) creatures live.

With panic a permanent feature of life in this papier mache town, will Horse and his girlfriend ever be alone?

Each speedy character is voiced - and animated - as if their very air contains both amphetamines and laughing gas.

Film: A Town Called Panic
Release date: 8th October 2010
Certificate: PG
Running time: 78 mins
Director: Stephane Aubier & Vincent Patar
Starring: Stephane Aubier, Jeanne Balibar, Nicolas Buysse, Véronique Dumont, Bruce Ellison
Genre: Animation
Studio: Optimum
Format: Cinema
Country: Belgium/Luxembourg/France

REVIEW: DVD Release: Naruto Shippuden The Movie

Film: Naruto Shippuden The Movie
Release date: 19th July 2010
Certificate: 12
Running time: 95 mins
Director: Hajime Kamegaki
Starring: Junko Takeuchi, Chie Nakamura, Ayumi Fujimura
Genre: Anime
Studio: Manga
Format: DVD
Country: Japan

Continuing, and integrating into the stories told in the “Shippuden” extension of the popular Naruto franchise, Naruto Shippuden The Movie tells the tale of a dark, banished force being resurrected to wage havoc and carnage on the Earth which, of course, our ninja heroes must prevent from happening.

Opening with an unsettling sequence of Naruto fighting with a demonic dragon, and ultimately perishing, we come to realise this was a prediction of things that may come to pass. With plans of reviving an ancient demon and his vast armies, a Shaman named Yomi travels to a guarded shrine to release the deadly Mōryō so that he may complete his quest for world domination.

As always, there is a weakness to the dastardly plan, and that comes in the form of a priestess known as Shion, who is the only one in knowledge of the sealing spell that can lock him away. Recruited to be her bodyguards, the familiar protagonists of Team 7 are drafted in to protect her as they travel together to incarcerate their dangerous nemesis…


As a progression from the series, our hero Naruto is, of course, aged in both appearance and vocals, but his attitude and stance on life, unfortunately, remains the same. Stuck somewhere between Ash Ketchum (Pokémon) and Goku (Dragonball), Naruto is a character with a huge amount of compassion and propensity for good within him, but also happens to be immensely naïve and prone to over sensitivity. He is a typical hero of an anime staple, someone whose heart is in the right place, but whose brain is liable to leave him at the most inopportune moment. Yet, it is these traits that lead Shion, the priestess he is charged with protecting, to fall for our blonde daredevil, as his brashness and exuberance wear off on her and, to a degree, her more demure, sensible self brushes off on Naruto.

For fans of the series, this instalment in the franchise will prove a worthwhile addition, as it retreads over familiar ground, and exposes the champions to the sort of conflicts and battles that have become the staple for the series. For those of us who are not engrossed by the stories of the world’s foremost ninja, it gives us very little to engage us on any sort of level. With feature length adaptations of long running anime, there is every possibility that criticisms may be levelled for doing nothing more than regurgitating the same tried and tested formula, but with a different antagonist at the end. The Dragonball Z saga was exceptional at doing precisely that, creating no fewer than fifteen individual films that, bar one, were all infuriatingly non-canon. It seems as if the Naruto writers, not merely content with being the foremost television programme with casual violence for the anime fan (since Dragonball Z’s departure), have set out to mimic the aforementioned series with completely redundant straight-to-DVD offerings.

It isn’t that Naruto Shippuden is unwatchable, it’s a vaguely entertaining story despite the highly clichéd ‘good vs. evil’ setup, but with series add-ons there must be some additional point to make the story worthwhile. Naruto, like the subsidiary characters, does not progress enough throughout the course of the story for the casual viewer to establish any emotional connection. The villain is but a cardboard cut-out, pasted from any number of generic storylines, bearing no relation or historical link with the characters, while his henchmen (despite their ninja prowess) wouldn’t feel out of place accompanying ‘The Penguin’ in an episode of the 1960s Batman series, given their mind-boggling anonymity. Additionally, because the Naruto saga is now so deeply entrenched in its own mythos and construct, there is little explanation to the whole array of terms that are used en mass, leaving the viewer somewhat dazed and stupefied.

As with all animated creations, there is one aspect of the production that cannot go without being scrutinised, and that is the quality of the animation itself. Being outside the usual twenty-minute time slot of the episodes, and specially commissioned, you could be forgiven for expecting a higher quality of drawing. Normally with feature length productions the animation is notably improved, for example the first Pokémon film, with a crisper finish to the format, but with Naruto Shippuden it is frighteningly normal. Not only does the quality fail to surpass its episodic counterparts, but the usage of CGI in creating the stone army of Mōryō verges on the comical for the lack of effort that has been put into merging it with the hand drawn elements.

While accessible and suitable for those with younger children, this cacophony of colourful madness pales in comparison to what is available to the more adult orientated market. For those searching for animated martial arts, there are titles such as Afro Samurai or Ninja Scroll that will more than deliver a greater punch, while for those searching for something more friendly, with warmth and charm, there is no better Japanese director than Hayao Miyazaki.


The latest tale of the boy with the “Nine-Tailed Demon Fox” sealed within him will please the hardened fan base, and undoubtedly create more followers, but there will be those who feel Naruto Shippuden is but one evolution up from Pokémon. BL