English Dub Review: Naruto Shippuden “Helmet Splitter: Jinin Akebino!”

While I was reading the manga, I was wondering what happened to Kakashi and his group before he made it to the main battlefield where Madara and Tobi was. We were shown the emotionally taxing fight with Zabuza and Haku, with Kakashi taking posession of Zabuza’s Executioner’s Blade very early in the war, then cut to the rest of the fighting. From the end of the fight, was looking to see some sort of closure from this, outside of the manga telling us “Kakashi’s Company won their battle, and they’re moving towards the rest of the fighting.”

And I got my wish. If I were none the wiser, I would say “Helmet Splitter: Jinn Akebino!” came right out of the manga. There doesn’t seem to be any of the trappings of past fillers, where they have nothing going on with the overarching story, nor it seems like a whole different animation team handled the animation. Everything about “Helmet Splitter: Jinin Akebino!” was on par with the canon episodes. As Naruto has progressed, especially since the beginning of the Ninja War Arc, the fillers have had a tendency to get better, but some of them fall back on old tendencies. So beggars can’t really be choosers.

It was great to see characters like Lee and Sai get some more time in the sun, because once their couple chapter story ended early on, they disappeared from the fight. I understand that most of the early fighting was Kabuto using the characters “skeletons” to try and get the upper hand on the Ninja Alliance, but there’s a literal shit ton of reanimated ninja that could have shown up to fight and keep this group going. I thought we would have had more, especially since, you know, Kakashi was a main character. That said, he was only around for about half of the episode. So, We won a bit, and lost a bit when it came to Kakashi.

The writers actually expanded Sai’s story even more. It was glad to see that there was more to him than the emotionally disconnected emo kid. The writers also went down the road of “what happens to all of the emotional energy that stores up when Sai stifles his emotions?” It’s kind of like bottling up when some negative shit goes down. Sooner or later, you’re going to explode in anger. Good to know, that Sai can actually put all of that wasted energy to use.

I really dug “Helmet Splitter: Jinn Akebino!” and the expansion of the characters it brought. Sai really needed it, and Lee proved that he would protect anyone, as long as they are an ally. We know that he’d protect Naruto, Sakura, Kakashi and so on, but never really saw Lee expand on that further. “Helmet Splitter: Jinn Akebino!” was a great episode, not just a great filler episode. It looks like we’re going to be getting more, because now we’re getting an episode based on Pakura of the Sand. Go on Hulu, and watch “Helmet Splitter: Jinn Akebino!” here.