Naruto Shippuden Episode 319
What They Say:
A reanimated Granny Chiyo attacks Kankuro and Mifune’s team. Kankuro fights back by using the human puppet of Sasori. The sight of Sasori causes Granny Chiyo to recall the painful memories that led her grandson to create his human puppets.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With a decent episode focusing on Fukai in the previous episode, this one goes and hauls out yet another character from the past to reanimated and have some fun with. Unlike those that were nonexistent before in the continuity or had such meager roles that even Naruto wiki pages had little mention of them, this episode brings us into contact with some more well known ones, as Granny Chiyo has come into the light. Her role was pretty significant at the start of the Shippuden series and lasted for quite a few episodes as she and others worked against the Akatsuki so her coming back is one that certainly makes sense and feels like it has a bigger connection to events and the cast in general.
Naturally, while there are things going on in the present, the show also intends to focus on the past as a way to reconnect us to the characters and to feel more for them, especially for ones like this where we haven’t seen her in a bit. This goes back to her time with a young Sasori and how he eliminated the things that were playing the role of his parents, which certainly is harmful to a young mind. Seeing Sasori throw himself into his puppets definitely makes a lot of sense and his focus is intense, which just helps to flesh out more of how he became what he was as we saw earlier in this series. This and the time with Chiyo definitely works well for both characters, though Chiyo in particular comes across well since she was a bit younger at the time and not quite so angry as when Naruto met her and had to deal with her.
The show works a lot of this back story in well and it keeps the fighting the present pretty minimal overall, which certainly helps since it’s kind of a short form forced measure. There are flashbacks to different periods here overall, including to when Sasori had passed initially, and that helps to provide some reminder of the past that he had and the kind of closure that existed before. The crux of the episode comes down to the way Chiyo is thinking of things in her reanimated state and how she’ll react to certain revelations along the way, which challenges her previous views on things like the puppets, but it’s not something that truly surprises. The characters are who they are and the writers really don’t want to stain their past contributions by going too far here with them in another direction, so it goes pretty much as you’d expect.
In Summary:
Naruto: Shippuden gives us a pretty serious episode here overall, with some much welcome humor just at the end, and it works well since Chiyo has long been a sympathetic and mildly complicated character because of her situation with her family and what she was doing with Gaara. With this episode, we get a new look at her and Sasori’s past and what the deal is with his parents brought into a new light that works quite well. It’s not filled with action or forced encounters for the most part and that definitely helps to smooth away some of the filler wrinkles that can damage episodes like this. With characters that actually have some meaning, it gives the episode more weight and that helps against the many other fluffy filler we’ve had lately.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.