When I viewed the second volume of Shadow Star Narutaru, I wasn't really impressed. The characters never engaged me and the low grade animation turned me off a bit. The third volume improves the series, but not much. The animation is still lousy, but some of the characters are starting to get interesting. It's too bad these are mostly the villains. The show's fatal flaw though is that it can't seem to decide what story it wants to tell, since it continues to develop more and more storylines, while never resolving anything.

This show is about Shiina and Akira, two teenage girls who share something in common: they both are psychically linked to a pair of "dragon childs." They can communicate with their dragons which are able to fly, but they aren't sure why they have them.

There are other teenagers who have dragons too. Some of these kids dominate their familiars to advance their own agendas. One wants to kill all of the intellectuals and weak people, and another wants to destroy the army. Added into this mix are the enigmatic angels, small but powerful beings who are seemingly indestructible. They love to fight, especially with the military, but their relationship to the dragon's in unknown.

This volume only has three episodes, but no two episodes seem related to each other. Things turn even darker than the previous set of shows when the battle between the army and the dragon's child turns very deadly. Poisonous gas is used against the military and many, many soldiers are killed, much to the joy of the one controlling the creature. Of course the army's reaction to this is never discussed. I guess they wouldn't worry about some unknown super-weapon hiding in Japan.

Change gear for the next episode when Sudo takes Akira and Shiina out fishing. The fragile Akira catches a fish and releases it, and Sudo uses that to his advantage on the way back home. "Isn't it fun playing with a life?" He's trying to turn her to his way of thinking, and it's had an adverse effect on her psyche.

Next show, next unrelated plot. Shiina is trying to get her Dragon's Child to obey her commands when she meets a strange girl, Jun, flying on a broom. She also learn a little more about the dragons.

This still hasn't captured my interest. There are just too many plots. Stick with one for heaven's sake! There were some wonderfully evil characters that could have been explored more fully. One such person was the young man who discovered that his girl friend was pregnant. He tells her to have the child, and he'd admit it was his. When she asks him why he doesn't marry her, he callously reveals that he has five children already, with two more on the way. Her total shock and his uncaring behavior piqued my interest. Of course, nothing else was done with these characters.

This show is pretty schizophrenic too. It goes from being light hearted and frivolous to eerie and dark at a moment's notice. It's really creepy too, not scary, but creepy. I liked that part; sixth grade kids talking about killing everyone in the world really gets your attention, but then the narrative shifts, and never seems to return to the interesting parts.

In the end, this show is ruined by being very disjointed, to the point of almost being incomprehensible. Tangets are flung off left and right, often to be abandoned. There are only 13 episodes in this series, but they are introducing new characters in the tenth episode. How they are ever going to wrap this up in one more DVD I can't imagine. I would be very surprised if they were able to draw this series to a satisfactory conclusion.

As I mentioned in my review of the previous volume, another strike against the show is the animation. It's really done on the cheap. There are a lot of shots that hade very little movement. The flying scenes are especially disappointing, with most of these scenes involving the dragons or planes shrinking over a static background. The rest of the time the limited animation wasn't too distracting, but the action scenes at the start of the disc were really affected by it.

Audio:

This disc comes with the original Japanese soundtrack, as well as an English dub, both in stereo. I alternated tracks while I was viewing the disc, and enjoyed the Japanese track more, as usual, but the English dub didn't have anything wrong with it. Both tracks sounded nice, with no distortion or dropouts. The dialog was easy to hear and the musical accompaniment was clear. A solid sounding disc.

Video:

The full frame video was only average. The image was fairly soft, and there was a lot of aliasing on diagonal lines. The aliasing wasn't overt, but on larger screens you'll be able to see it in a lot of scenes. The colors were bright and solid, and the detail was fine.

Extras:

Like the previous volume, this disc comes with several galleries. There is an art gallery devoted to images from the show, a collection of storyboards, and a gallery of character design sheets. There are also trailers to the first four volumes of the series (US release version.) In addition to all of this, there are also previews to other CPM DVDs and manga.

Final Thoughts:

This could be an interesting show, but the many different plot lines that get flung about really try my patience. The show is filled with plots and characters that are never examined or finished. If they could pick a story and tell it, this might be an engaging show, but as it is, this program is just a mess. I did enjoy some aspects of this program, especially some of the creepy kids. This barely rates a Rent it rating.