The finger tapping got to me too...they padded those first few minutes hardcore.

Liked the new ED though. :) More upbeat like the old series was.

Maybe it was a message to the producers: give us more money or we do this in the next episode too :)

When the series ends ( hopefully we'll gave quite a while to go) we get an epilogue of a couple years into the future

so for naruto we have just a general anime discuss thread, not a thread for each episode??

Pretty much yep.

Discussion for episodes dropped so low that the mods took this approach. That's what you get with constant fillers :)

Fake rampaging Kyuubi sure gave them a headache.
It was nice watching them fight it though.
They had a pretty good strategy and finished it rather quickly.
Unfortunately for them, another enemy appeared soon after.

WHY! god damn it why the fuck is it going to fillers agian!

It's a single filler episode to promote the new movie.

Better this type of filler because the movie itself looks interesting and Kishimoto himself is participating than your usual filler saga.
I generally don't watch fillers (I only watched the one about the six-tails, the end of that was so disappointing) but I will check next episode.

Of course the real reason is they're gaining ground on the manga again, so they'll take any excuse to slip in a filler episode.

Well, at least they finished off this fight. The new Ino-Shika-Cho legend is pretty epic.

What? there 65 chapters behind at the rate the anime's been moving that's 65 episodes.

The real reason is promoting the upcoming movie. They did the same thing for the 2009 and 2010's movies (and maybe for last year's movie too, but I can't remember).

Only 65 chapters huh?

Yeah any excuse to squeeze another filler out.

So, after abandoning the anime since the death of Asuma (since then, I only read the manga), I watched the latest episode on a whim. And...the animation quality of this episode pretty much surprised me. It’s rather good for a long running show like this. Is the quality always like this starting from Pain’s invasion to Konoha arc?:confused:

It depends on the episode really. Big storyline fights usually get more effort.

except with the kyubii vs pain, they just tried to do something completely different and failed miserably.

I did say 'usually'.

well it still was more effort than usual. I think I'm one of the few who actually enjoyed 6tails vs pain. there were some silly parts to it sure, but i really liked how they tried something different and there were certainly some awesome parts to that fight.

it's much better than watching episodes like these current ones imho. for example, watching darui's body hover around the screen as if he is standing on water looks so awful i cant stand it... there's so much repetitive and static animation. the effort is just not there for these initial fights

The animation for Pein vs 6-tails Naruto was awesome. Movie quality even. Its the art-style during some points that many seem to dislike. Admittedly, the studio in charge of that one took a different approach than what we're used to. But the effort seemed apparent (to me anyways) nonetheless. In hindsight, they just shouldn't have gone out of there way to exaggerate the facial expressions and movements of the two characters so much during some of the more intense moments of the action. It didn't bother me in the least bit. But those who feel the same appear to be in the minority around here.