Jayn_Newell: Hmmm, that’s a different kettle of fish then. Deaths per se don’t bother me so much, depending greatly on the context. Maiming and especially suicide do.
I guess I’d better watch a lot more Naruto and figure out how I feel about it.
When I was a wee lad in the 1970s, my mom wouldn’t let me watch Speed Racer because it was “too violent”.
Does anyone have any feedback specific to Yu Yu Hakusho ('scuse the “Ya Ya” spelling earlier, that’s what my boy calls it), re it’s level of violence or suitability? From the Wikipedia description, it sounds fairly dark, but it also sounds pretty goofy so maybe it’s not that bad.
The scene you describe is one of my favorites in the series, because Hinata (the shy ninja) reminds me of myself at that age, and I always wished I could find a boy who would have my back against people who teased me. Never did find one.
I also like it because a few episodes later, Naruto gives Neji (the asshole cousin) the attitude adjustment he deserves, and he becomes more of a decent guy as the series develops. One recurring theme of this show is that Naruto has the effect of changing people’s attitudes for the better, usually through friendship or by inspiring them to be better people, but sometimes (as with Neji) through a good old-fashioned ass-kicking.
Sometimes I will let the Princess sit with me and watch an episode of this show, but sometimes I will turn it off when I know it’s going to get really violent, as it has with the newest episodes they’ve been showing on Saturdays. I tape them to watch later, and she hasn’t seen those at all.
I’ve watched all of YYH, and it depends on which story arc. One arc in particular is darker than the others. It centers around a video called the Chapter Black tape, a two hour compilation of the worst atrocities committed by humanity, as well as the idea of humans torturing and killing demons. This arc also features such lovely things as a bad guy with multiple personalities, the death of a little boy duped into working for said bad guy, and an evil demon who ends up with an eternity of pain and suffering.
But there are arcs that are more a straightforward fight against a bad guy, or one at the end where the heroes bring peace to Demon World, et cetera. So most of it is okay. The violence depicted is generally not gory - on the same level as Naruto, for example. But it also deals with topics like death, loss, revenge, love, family, friends, self-worth, and so on.
Slayers is on TV? This is the show with Lina Inverse, right? We rented an episode way back when shows were still on videotape, and my daughter, who was about four at the time, fell in love with it. She eventually could say Lina Inverse’s Dragon Slave spell by heart!
When she was in kindergarten, she wanted to be Lina Inverse for Halloween, and so my mother and I made her a costume. We were into cosplay before we had ever even heard of the word! We ended up going to the first Anime Detour simply so we could show the costume off to people who would recognize what she was supposed to be.
So, maybe I’m a bad mommy, but I love that show. I don’t remember much grabbing of breasts–however, Lina is sometimes teased for having small breasts and looking like a kid in general. However, she is a powerful sorceress and not one to be trifled with. I think that’s what attracted my daughter to the character in the first place.
Currently, she is 11 and likes Inuyasha, and she tells me that she plays Inuyasha with some of her friends at recess. One other girl is a big fan of the show (and apparently watches it at 1 a.m.–we have the DVD’s), and they have to explain the show to the other girls.
I would laugh so hard if my daughter said, “My life is cursed!” That’s almost as good as having a four-year-old start muttering, “Darkness beyond twilight, crimson beyond blood that flows…”
I forgot to mention in my earlier post - back when Sailor Moon was in syndication, I taped every episode and put the tapes in a box when I got tired of them. I took them out a couple of years ago, for the Princess and the Diva to watch. The Diva soon lost interest, but the Princess kept watching, and now she’s bugging me to take her along when I go to Anime Expo next year so she can cosplay as Sailor Jupiter. I’m wondering how I can make a Sailor Senshi costume in 6 months with my minimal sewing skills. (Maybe I can order it online…) Meanwhile, she likes to play with her Pokemons and occasionally will play ninja at home because she’s the only girl she knows who watches Naruto. I’m glad to see I’m not the only Doper who’s raising a second-generation anime fan. (I hesitate to call my daughter an otaku, since, unlike me, she has a life.)
I grew up watching Bugs Bunny and reading the uncensored Grimm’s Brothers. I thought that the rascally rabbit worked wonders for teaching me the rules of cartoons and stoking my imagination, and Grimm presented a part of life that I otherwise would have zero interaction with (and I surprisingly learned very little about the dark side of humanity, but then again I’m clueless).
But a lot of anime isn’t for kids at all–and in Japan, they also think kids can handle a lot more on TV than over here. (There’s a disturbing amount of potty humor, for instance, and a young kid doesn’t really need MORE encouragement to make jokes about various bodily functions.)
I know they made sewing patterns for Sailor Moon costumes back when the show was on US TV. You may need to look on eBay, because they may be out of print. My daughter wants to be Belldandy from Ah My Goddess (which is a good example of a non-violent G-rated anime). I’m really not all that good at sewing either, and only have four months. However, I made her a Ranma costume last year, and it won the Emcee’s Choice award. That was the first year she entered the official masquerade.
Right. Do these shows teach valuable lessons? Once in a while, perhaps, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Naruto is an awesome show if you’re ten. Eight seems like it would be a little early, but the show isn’t that bad. The fights can be moderately graphic, and pretty much anything that has to do with the Uchiha Sasuke character is a little iffy.
As you’ve probably gathered, the show is about a modern world where ninjas and magic and such co-exist with technology. It follows a team of kids who’ve just finished their training as they grow up, and gets increasingly dark as it goes on. One of the main characters in Naruto’s team is obsessed with hunting down and murdering his brother, after said brother snapped and massacred his entire household.
I think that if Slayers is too much, the worst parts of Naruto will probably be out of bounds too. But either way, don’t let an eight year old watch Fullmetal Alchemist. That one’s definitely an early to late teens show. It sports an oodle of semi-mature themes (conflicts between faith and reason, the interaction of technology and superstition, war, politics, a bunch of ethical stuff) and the fights can be pretty graphic. Also:
(don’t read the following if you don’t want fairly significant parts of the plot spoiled)
fullmetal alchemist actually sported what was, for me, one of the most upsetting plot twists in an anime. The show is about two brothers who go around and do stuff, and in the very first episode they meet this extremely devout woman named Rose. Rose is the nicest person you could imagine, and gets to go through all kinds of conflict and teenage angst after said brothers reveal that her priest is a power-hungry mad scientist who uses magic to imitate divine powers. The plot wanders elsewhere at that point, only to return almost 30 episodes later to reveal that Rose was brutally gang-raped by enemy soldiers, rendered mute by the psychological trauma, pregnant, and now some kind of holy woman for the remnants of her city.
For an eight year old, the original Dragonball is actually pretty good: where DBZ tends to involve 20-minute long bowel movements punctuated by kung fu, I remember the original dragonball actually being funny. Sailor Moon has already been mentioned as being decent, but for the love of god make sure that your kid watches the subtitled version; the English dub rapes the show like you wouldn’t believe, so it’s probably best to give it a pass if he doesn’t like subtitles yet.
Eyeshield 21 is an anime about playing football that annoys the shit out of me, but I didn’t see anything in it that would be too offensive.
Ranma 1/2 has occasional sexual innuendo and is about a boy who turns into a girl when he gets splashed with water. If that’s alright, nothing else in the show will probably offend.
Avatar: the Last Airbender is an american cartoon that tries to mimic the anime style, and if you’re willing to overlook the fact that the main characters all come from a culture that is obviously a hilariously inaccurate ripoff of Wuxia-esque China (which is already inaccurate) and northern Tibet, it’s actually a pretty entertaining show.
Hikaru no Go is about a 6th grader who meets a spirit of a Heian-period master of Go, a Japanese board game, and the adventures the two have as said 6th grader tries to become a professional Go player. It’s pretty harmless (if you’re fine with the fact that the Heian guy killed himself by throwing himself into a river before becoming a spirit), but it might be boring or hard to follow, since the bulk of the show involves the titular character playing Go while somebody narrates the game from off-screen.
Two shows that always seem to get brought up in discussion about good anime for kids are Tenchi Muyo and Pokemon. The Tenchi Muyo shows are about a guy who gets stuck living with five women, all of whom are trying to become his girlfriend/wife/whatever, and I guess they’re fine for an eight year old since they never get that explicit. But I’d recommend waiting until your kid is 11-13 and showing him the Tenchi Muyo OVA, because it’s really, really funny once you’re old enough to get and appreciate the sex jokes.
And I suppose there’s nothing wrong with Pokemon, but it’s one of the most inane and pointless shows I’ve ever watched.
Yeah, I’m going to provisionally allow Naruto, but keep an eye peeled. I’ll talk to him about anything that looks disturbing at least. Is Uchiha Sasuke the character you mention in your spoiler? And maybe I just caught a really bad section of Slayer… but just from the name of the show it sounds like it’d be a little much for now.
Noted. Thank you. The themes you mentioned don’t seem like awful ones for the most part, but your spoiler sounds pretty disturbing.
snert Yeah, that was my take as well. I can’t stand that show. But he likes it, and it seems fine as far is objectionability.
I love this show, maybe even more than my son does. We’ve been watching it together since “book 1”. The story is epic, the characters are awesome. I can’t wait to see the anti-hero join the good guys (which does defuse some of the really interesting qualities of Zuko. But story arcs are like that).
Me, too, with perhaps the exception of DBZ. But its harmless.
I don’t think anyone would say that. Every kid is different. We have friends whose daughter (at least a year ago, last time I saw her) at 6 was so sensitive she couldn’t watch almost any mid-range (more complex than Higglytown Heros or Blue’s Clues) kids shows – the smallest dilemma or setback in the plot for the characters would drive her to weeping fits. Apparently your girl is on the other end of the spectrum.
Here you go, squeegee - this site has streaming video of several cartoon network shows, including five episodes of Naruto ( looks like they rotate them in order every several days ). As fate would have it, it currently has the very two episodes ( 46 & 47 ) Lucky 13 and I were referencing above. So you can vet them ahead of time to get a feel for the level of violence.
Good luck finding it, subtitled or not (unless you like bootleg copies). The licenses for the series ran out a few years ago and weren’t renewed–from my understanding, the choice was made by the Japanese company, so I wouldn’t expect it to be picked up again either. As a result, the series is entirely out of print on this side of the ocean and legit copies are scarce. The English seems to be a bit easier to find though–the subtitled versions only got a couple years of print before the licenses ran out. It can be found, but it takes some digging.
Excellent! You’re awesome to have around, Tamerlane.
Actually, the parts you and Lucky 13 describe don’t sound that bad, they sound pretty epic – Naruto defends his friend, and in the end the bully gets his comeuppance and becomes a better person for it. Not bad lessons there – steadfast loyalty, and karma being a bitch.
But I’ll watch the shows in any case.
One more question:
Is it a required convention in Japanese Anime translations to English to use one female voice actor for every single female character in that show? 
(I’m sure that’s not the case, but it sure seems that way.)
Not really. You’ll get voice actors/actresses who voice a lot of characters over many shows, but then that’s the same in Western animation. And female VAs playing young male characters, but again, same thing. But not voicing loads of main characters in one show.
Yep! I think that vetting Naruto would be the best option, like other people have suggested. If you’re going to tentatively go with it, however, I would mention one last heads up: the show is broken into three real sections: there’s the canon part of the original Naruto, where the main characters are 12-13 (I think?), and they go around doing ninja stuff and learning about themselves, friendship, and so forth. That lasts from episode 1 until episode 141, which I think is the last canon episode. Now, as you may know, the Naruto anime was based on a comic (manga) of the same name, and the anime followed the manga plot pretty religiously. However, by episode 141 they had almost caught up with the manga storyline. As such, they bring the current plot lines to a moderately satisfying halt: two famous ninjas up and offer to train Naruto and his friend Sakura, but they have to “do stuff” first. Following this is the second section of the show, which consists of a bunch of non-canon episodes that revolve around Naruto and Sakura hanging around the village and randomly going off to help other people on missions. Absolutely nothing happens and the production quality drops through the floor, and this lasts for about eighty episodes while they wait for the manga storyline to get ahead of the anime again.
Now, both of those sections are probably fine for an eight year old, although I would recommend you vet the stuff on your own time. (Characters do die, and there are a few random icky scenes, like when they show a belt of scary-looking tools and imply that dead ninjas have their bodies destroyed in a very specific fashion to prevent rival factions from reverse-engineering how their training works.)
The real rub is the third section, which actually just began a few months ago. This section gets a new name (it’s Naruto: Shippuden now instead of just plain old Naruto), and the characters have aged three years since the end of the canon stuff. It’s still mostly fluff, but since the main characters are older they’re taking on more dangerous missions, and the content gets a little darker as a result. Most of it is still harmless, but you might find the general tone disagreeable:
[spoiler]These are the three worst bits I can remember:
One of the good guys, while fighting a bad guy who poisons his weapons, drops out of sight for a moment and intentionally cuts herself with her own knife to make it look like she’d been hit, poisoned, and subsequently disabled.
Another good guy gets poisoned by the same villain, and sits around for three days screaming in agony.
One of the main villains of the first 20-some episodes is a serial killer who murders famous ninjas, turns their bodies into life-sized puppets, and either crawls inside the puppet to fight or takes control of it remotely.[/spoiler]
So yea. Naruto is probably a neat show, but I would really recommend vetting it regularly, at least until you get a good idea of what it’s about.
Oh! And I just wanted to edit this to say that you should do this thread again in about 3-5 years. A lot of anime is too violent or edgy for eight year olds, but there are a bunch of shows that are really outstanding for the 12-15 year old demographic.
Thanks! I’ll look around. The thing is, now she’s wavering between cosplaying as Sailor Moon or as Sakura from Naruto. I might even dress like a character from whatever show she settles on, if she wouldn’t be too embarrassed. I saw an Akatsuki robe in my local anime shop which I’m considering buying. (Akatsuki is the organization of villains that wants to kill Naruto for the demon he carries inside him. They wear black robes with a red cloud design.) If not, I can find a purple dress and go as Queen Beryl.