As a kid, Masashi Kishimoto loved anime and developed a serious fixation on the works of Akira Toriyama. He watched Dr. Slump and played Dragon Quest. He couldn’t afford Weekly Shōnen Jump, but a friend let him read Dragon Ball each week. Things change, though, and by high school he was more interested in baseball and basketball. But then Akira happened. Akira awoke his childhood love of drawing, and when he graduated, he went to college for art.
From there he began what would be a years-long process of searching for the right manga concept. Kishimoto wanted to write a shounen series, but many of his ideas were more fitting for a seinen magazine. In 1996, he received honorable mention in Shueisha’s monthly Hop Step Award announcement. Soon after, an editor would join him while he struggled to find a concept that would stick. In 1997, the first rendition of Naruto would run as a one-shot in Akamaru Jump Summer, a Jump-branded magazine focusing on one-shots by new and amateur artists, but the series proper wouldn’t make its way into Weekly Shōnen Jump for another two years. This sparked a friendly rivalry with Eiichiro Oda, creator of One Piece.
Naruto is a kid in a world of ninjas, and he wants to grow up to be the greatest ninja. This probably sounds pretty familiar. Unfortunately for our young ninja, when he was just a baby the Hokage of the Hidden Leaf Village was forced to sacrifice himself in order to seal a powerful and dangerous Nine-Tailed Fox inside the infant Naruto. This puts a bit of a strain on his plans to become the next Hokage, leader of the village’s ninjas, and it paints a big, red kick-me sign on his back.
The second sibling of Jump’s Big 3 ran for 15 years, finally coming to a close in manga form in November 2014. It produced 72 volumes of manga, two spin-off manga, multiple anime, video games and much more. In Japan, 113 million copies of manga have been sold. In the US, 95 million copies have been sold.
Studio Pierrot’s first Naruto anime started in 2002 and ran to 2007. It ended at 220 episodes, and 95 of those episodes were filler. 86 of them were sequential, much to the annoyance of fans. The same year, Naruto: Shippuden picked up where the other series left off, and it ran an additional 500 episodes.
For a period of time in the U.S., Naruto was the biggest of the Big 3 by a large margin. I still have flashbacks of nerdy pre-teens (and not so pre-teens and some post-grads) in Naruto headbands. It was (and still is to some degree) everywhere. When it was time for the anime to come over, fans were already gun shy around 4Kids, but Viz Media rescued the series for U.S. distribution.
Like the other members of the Big 3, Naruto spent a lot of time on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block both before and after Toonami’s shutdown and reboot. Shippuden also aired on Disney XD for awhile.
The manga ended in 2014, and Shippuden ended in 2017. With anime and manga now done it seemed like it was time for the franchise to take rest, but it kept on chugging. The franchise continues with Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, which I was sad to learn has absolutely nothing to do with Star Trek: The Next Generation. Boruto is Naruto’s son (spoilers) and the series now focuses on him.
Kishimoto mostly set aside his role on Naruto in favor of taking on new projects after the manga ended in 2014. He still oversees the production of Boruto, but he is now free to take on new projects. Instead, one of his former assistants serves as the artist for the new manga. Kishimoto is now working on a new sci-fi series set to debut this year.
Tonight’s post is a tad shorter than the article about One Piece, but I think this gives you the gist of what Naruto is. Tomorrow we’ll knock out Tite Kubo’s Bleach.
chasetriesagain.com 