Climbing the Third Stair

I haven't seen a lot of anime, so a few years ago a friend sent me some cds that she had burned some fandubs to, in order to give me a sampling of what is out there. One of them had episodes 1-25 of Naruto on it, and for no particular reason I started watching it on New Years Eve. (Yes, it took me that long to get around to it. Apparently I am not a big consumer of visual media.)

Having mainlined the first 20 episodes in a week I feel confident that I am a fan of this series. This is not to say that I love everything about it, but I am interested in seeing if the Lincoln library has any of the manga or anime volumes for me to continue in following the characters. Well, some of the characters. Sakura is pointlessly useless in, well, everything, which annoys me to no end. Which is a shame, because the black-and-white Inner Sakura has some charming possibilities.

Naruto is normally a character that would annoy me, but he quickly moves beyond being simply an Annoying Kid. It helps that he has a comprehensible problem--the unwillingness of most of the village to treat him as a person--and that he is trying the best he can, given his age and resources, to fix that problem. I also love his back-and-forth relationship with Sasuke. They hold each other in contempt, they work together, they are back to arguing, Sasuke sacrifices himself to save Naruto without understanding why, Naruto flips out in his grief--and in another few episodes is back to hurling insults at Sasuke. It has the messiness of real life about it.

And then there is Kakashi, who I have quickly come to adore. He is yet another one of those handsome badass white-haired men that anime/manga seems to create with some regularity, and if that was all he was I'd probably still be a fan. (Because I am that shallow.) But Kakashi is special to me because he's a teacher who genuinely cares about his students and is doing his best to teach and guide them. I don't think of myself as someone who loves children, but the fact is that I spent more than 10 years as a Girl Scout leader (and I didn't even have a daughter!) and I identify strongly with characters who are responsible towards the children they have been entrusted with.

I also like that Kakashi fights with intelligence, and not just raw power. "I intentionally got wounded twice so that I could later track you in this impentrable fog by the smell of my blood on your weapons" is the kind of logic that only works in an anime-world, but if you really are in an anime-world it's a pretty bit of advanced planning.


The other thing that Nartuo has going for it is that at this point it is a story about a team. Watching a group of characters struggle to work together in spite of their personality clashes is my catnip, and as long as the series keeps dishing this out I'll be happy with it.