Naruto: The Symphonic Experience @ The Overture Center

Words By: Oliver Gerharz and Elijah Pines

The Overture Center hosted Naruto: The Symphonic Experience the evening of April 24th. The event featured a live orchestra covering songs from the first 220 episodes of the series.

Naruto: The Symphonic Experience started with a greeting from two energetic hosts who told the crowd that this wouldn’t be a silent showing. Everyone was encouraged to cheer, whoop and holler whenever their favorite moments from the series came up.

For those who don’t know the basics of Naruto, it is a popular anime series about a young ninja named Naruto Uzumaki who wants to lead his village as the Hokage, meaning the strongest ninja. Beyond that, we didn’t know anything about Naruto besides a handful of highlights each – neither of us had seen the show.

The show opened with our hosts singing Naruto’s first opening theme. The crowd of superfans buzzed as the hosts gave a divine rendition of the song, clean and perfectly on note. The female host was bouncing all over the walls, and it was her singing voice that established the mood that night. The male host was more casual, with less movement and an unzipped hoodie. However, his voice was strong enough to carry the whole performance.

Then the orchestra slowed to a more expositional tune as projected clips from the first episodes of the series played, introducing us for the first time to Naruto as he developed his ninja skills at ninja school.

After this exposition, this abridged version of Naruto featured almost exclusively fight scenes. This follows since so many fan–favorite songs come from those moments where the characters fight against and overcome some insurmountable villain. Occasional bits of exposition kept us barely stringing along as we went from battle to battle, but a good amount of the story was lost in translation from anime to orchestral experience.

The most significant effect of this was that Naruto appears significantly less sympathetic. With everything besides fights trimmed to the bone Naruto comes across more as a violent menace than a heroic ninja. Most comical among these is when Naruto and crew fight a group of men on a bridge. Not sure who they were or why they hated Naruto and friends, but this was the first moment in the symphony where the hype of both the crowd and the music hit a peak.

Other highlights from the first act include:

-       The Cello player getting a brooding solo under a green spotlight when the first villain appeared.

-       A snakelike villain named Orochimaru giving Naruto and his friend Sasuke Uchiha cursed tattoos by licking and biting them.

-       The flute player sliding underneath the sax player, shooting bubbles from a bubble gun during a sax solo.

-       Naruto meets an old man named Jiraiya, who he accurately calls “Perverted Hermit.” To convince Perverted Hermit to train him, Naruto uses “Sexy Jutsu” to turn into a naked girl. The crowd went wild.

After the intermission, we couldn’t help but notice that Sakura Haruno, Naruto’s other best friend and the series’ female lead, was completely absent. Anime fans will know what happened, but at the Overture Center that night she might as well have just disappeared into thin air.

At the end of the day, the orchestra did a fantastic job with the songs that fans had come to love as they watched and listened to Naruto’s journey all over again. Symphonic experiences featuring songs from anime are becoming more common, and from our symphonic experience with Naruto, it was clear to see that fans of the series were overjoyed to see their favorite hype moments have new life breathed into them.

Final takeaways from Naruto: The Symphonic Experience:

Oliver - Naruto is way less cool than Luffy. I’m sticking to One Piece.

Elijah - Sasuke…