Naruto

2002–. TV series. (220 X 30 min., continuing series.) Martial arts/fantasy/adventure. org Masashi Kishimoto (manga). dir Hayato Date. scr Katsuyuki Sumisawa, Michiko Yokote, others. mus Toshio Masuda. des Hirofumi Suzuki, Tetsuya Nishio, others. -bc

Naruto is an extraordinarily popular martial arts coming-of-age saga with action, humor, and fantasy that is still going strong on Japanese TV as of publication. The title character is a scrappy, determined young hero who wants to excel as a ninja despite rank immaturity and constant obstacles.

Naruto is an orphaned boy in the Hidden Leaf Village who is treated as an outcast because, as a baby, his body was used to seal the spirit of the Nine-Tailed Fox, a demonic entity that ravaged the village and killed many people twelve years earlier. Despite this drawback, Naruto’s ambition is to be the village’s hokage, or top ninja, and struggles to make his way through the village’s official Ninja School. The series follows Naruto’s progress as he is placed by sensei Kakashi with two reluctant teammates, the skilled and confident Sasuke, the most popular boy in school and the one all the girls like, and Sakura, a spunky girl whom Naruto likes, but who worships Sasuke. The training emphasizes techniques for focusing and enhancing the body’s natural energy stream, or chakra, to execute sophisticated maneuvers such as the Kage Bunshin Jutsu (Shadow Clone Jutsu), in which the user is able to create multiple flesh-and-blood duplicates of himself to join him in battle.

The team members succeed in their first test and graduate from Ninja School as genin (first stage ninja) and move on to the chunin exam which is in three stages—a written test; a physical challenge staged as a mission to recover scrolls from the Forest of Death; and a series of tournament bouts between finalists who have passed the other stages. Naruto and his team barely survive the Forest of Death, where a villainous ninja master and village defector named Orochimaru has begun his covert campaign against the Leaf Village. He bites Sasuke on the neck and leaves a curse mark that will come to plague the boy later on. Three ninjas from the Sand Village, Gaara, Kankuro, and Temari, who are part of the competition, are revealed to be working for Orochimaru and instrumental in his plan of attack. Naruto and his teammates survive the Forest of Death, along with other friends from Ninja School, including Shikamaru, Ino, Choji, Kiba, Neji, Rock Lee, and Hinata.

They make it to the third stage where all finalists are pitted against each other in a series of matches to weed out all but the best fighters who will then become chunin. In the final rounds, Naruto fights and defeats Neji, surprising the mass of spectators, who are startled at the progress Naruto has made both in skill and discipline. The mischievous, trouble-making boy has learned to work as a teammate, mastered a number of difficult techniques, and developed strategies for winning. Sasuke is pitted against Gaara from the Sand Village and as their match is winding up, Orochimaru begins his attack on the Leaf Village.

Over the course of several dozen subsequent episodes, the Leaf Village prevails against Orochimaru, although not before the loss of Sarutobi, the Third Hokage, the village’s esteemed ninja leader; Naruto gets a new trainer, Jiraiya, the “pervy sage,” who helps Naruto learn to control the chakra of the Nine-Tailed Fox; a new hokage, a woman named Tsunade, is installed; and Sasuke starts to feel the effects of the curse mark of Orochimaru. The action builds to a battle royal between Naruto and Sasuke. Afterwards, Orochimaru goes into hiding with Sasuke. Other adventures intercede and take up the characters’ time, all while Sasuke remains under the dark tutelage of Orochimaru, who plots another attack. . . .

Naruto takes place in a strange but picturesque alternate universe of nation-villages (Hidden Leaf Village, Sand Village, Wind Village, Sound Village, etc.) resembling traditional pre-modern Tokugawa-era Japanese villages, but with the occasional glimpse of modern technology, such as computers, photo magazines, and videotape players. However, we never see firearms or motor vehicles. The villages have shops, streets, and public buildings, including large, notably rundown arenas for the various tournaments. Much of the action takes the characters out into forest settings and spectacular nature scenes. One breathtaking backdrop for a key battle (Naruto vs. Sasuke) is a massive waterfall bordered by giant statues of legendary ninjas carved into the rock face alongside the falls.

Each member of the large cast of characters is distinct from every other and given unique design touches, both in facial features, costumes, and accessories, with Naruto’s spiky blond hair and orange jumpsuit standing out, as do the unusual whisker marks on his face, a hint of the Nine-Tailed Fox spirit encased within. Just as the character designers of Rurouni Kenshin and Samurai Champloo used modern touches in hairstyles and fashion accessories to spice up their period settings, the designers of Naruto, not bound by a specific period or setting, let their imaginations run wild in clothing and styling their motley crew of young ninjas, older teachers, and assorted villains. Gaara’s red hair, thick eye liner, tattooed face kanji, and ever-present sand gourd on his back are all attention-getting features, and very much attuned to his character. The female characters—and there are lots of them—are all interesting-looking, vibrant, strong, and attractive without resorting to the kawaii, or high cuteness, characteristics that bedevil so many anime heroines. Sakura looks and moves like an actual adolescent girl, at that awkward stage just before young womanhood, and she displays remarkable self-awareness amid the wild mood swings, from joyous to depressed, so typical of her age group. Of all the characters, she is arguably the most vividly realized.

The music by Toshio Masuda deserves special note because it comprises one of those rare anime TV scores that avoids reliance on a handful of recurring themes, instead offering different music in every episode designed to fit the mood of the scene. Masuda draws on the full range of instruments and music styles at his fingertips, from a pulsing rock beat to a pounding, mournful piano solo, and is especially good when he uses traditional Asian-sounding arrangements of strings and woodwinds to underscore an action scene.

Naruto: Find the Crimson Four-Leaf Clover! (2003, OAV)

Naruto: Battle at Hidden Falls: I Am the Hero! (aka Mission: Protect the Waterfall Village! 2004, OAV)

Naruto: Konoha Annual Sports Festival (2004, OAV)

Naruto the Movie: Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow (2004, movie)

Naruto Movie 2: The Illusionary Ruins at the Depths of the Earth (2005, movie)

Naruto: Finally a Clash! Jounin vs. Genin!! Indiscriminate Grand Melee Tournament Meeting!! (2005, bonus episode included in the Naruto Narutimate Hero video game)

Naruto Movie 3: The Animal Riot of Crescent Moon Island (2006, movie)

Naruto Shippuden (Hurricane Chronicles) (2007, continuation of the TV series)

If Rurouni Kenshin merged with Dragon Ball Z, with a twist of Pokémon, the result might be Naruto. Martial artists go on long missions—on foot, as in RK—but also spend several episodes on each bout, as was common in DBZ, and obsess over reaching the next power level. When Rock Lee uses the Hidden Lotus to unlock his chakra, or when Naruto unleashes the chakra of the Nine-Tailed Fox, it’s on a par with Goku or Gohan going into Super Saiyan mode in DBZ. The Pokémon parallel is found in Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke, who behave as older, serious, more intense versions of Pokémon’s star trio of Ash, Misty, and Brock.

While the earlier series each have their considerable strengths, Naruto stands out by virtue of its concentrated focus on issues of character development and relationships. While the martial arts action is plentiful, as well as consistently brutal and imaginative, it’s woven into a narrative fabric based entirely on the story of these kids’ growth into maturity, and their development as team members who come to rely on and support each other. Naruto himself starts out as a wild, undisciplined, mischievous boy, but he gradually becomes the biggest cheerleader for his teammates, Sakura and Sasuke, shouting irrepressibly from the sidelines during their bouts, and they come to care about him and support him, too. In fact, the growing feeling of mutual respect between Naruto and Sakura and their increasing reliance on each other over the course of 140 or so episodes, particularly after Sasuke is lured to the dark side, is subtly drawn but deeply moving, and provides the series’ true emotional core.

In all of the confrontations and bouts, there are frequent flashbacks to the characters’ childhoods and the attendant traumas they all suffered, from Sasuke’s grief at seeing his family slaughtered by his revered older brother, to Neji’s anger at the sacrifice of his father to protect his uncle’s family to Gaara being cruelly exploited as a child for his killing ability by the Sand Village ninjas. We see how Sakura blossomed once she became friends with Ino, only to become her rival in adolescence over the affections of Sasuke. We come to understand these characters and how they came to be the way they are. The stylistic strategy to support this emphasis on character is found in the frequent use of closeups of just about everybody. We get to see these people and feel what they’re going through, even the bad guys. And, like all good film actors, their faces tell the story.

While all of the characters are compelling, it is Naruto who keeps us engaged throughout. He’s an out-of-control troublemaker when we first meet him, and somewhat obnoxious to boot. We can understand why the other kids scorn him. Yet he slowly matures into a true hero. His sheer willpower accomplishes miracles. He never gives up and he never stops trying. He is wounded, battered, and even defeated on occasion, but always picks himself up and starts over. He never gives in to despair. And he becomes a source of inspiration for many of the others, including Sakura, who’d once ridiculed him. It is Naruto who teaches them that they are not bound by their “destiny.” As Neji taunts Naruto during their bout, insisting it’s his destiny to win, Naruto defeats him with a technique he constantly failed back at school, declaring quite pointedly that he overcame the destiny the villagers saw for him, which was to fail. “So don’t come whining to me with this destiny stuff,” he tells Neji, “and stop trying to tell me you can’t change what you are!”

Naruto boasts a relentless narrative drive that is sustained for 134 solid episodes graced with hard-hitting action, intricate storytelling, clever twists, fluid animation, and a host of intriguing characters who we come to truly care about. However, once Sasuke disappears from the story line, the series is never quite as compelling; no new narrative arc with quite the same captivating power was to emerge in the subsequent eighty-plus episodes, this largely because the anime caught up too quickly with the manga story line and the producers had to create “filler” episodes while waiting for the next manga arc to be completed. As of this writing, fans outside of Japan are awaiting the latest season, boasting a new narrative arc and a new title, Naruto Shippuden (Hurricane Chronicles), which premiered on TV in Japan in February 2007.

Episodes 131 to 134 constitute the climax of the series, the knock-down-drag-out battle between Naruto and Sasuke, with Naruto determined to prevent Sasuke’s fall to the dark side. The actual fighting occurs mostly in episode 133, while the bulk of the other episodes is given over to flashbacks of the boys’ relationship over the years.

Episode 32, “Sakura Blossoms,” flashes back to Sakura’s past relationship with her female rival, Ino, while Ino and her teammates watch helplessly from hiding in the Forest of Death as Sakura’s team is beaten and battered by the Sound Ninjas, leaving Sakura the lone member still standing, and agonize over risking their own safety by jumping in to help. Episode 41, “Kunoichi Rumble: The Rivals Get Serious!,” continues the focus on Sakura and Ino as the bout between the two is interrupted by frequent flashbacks to their childhood and adolescence, including a flower arrangement class where Ino tells Sakura, “You’re a bud waiting to bloom.”

Episode 62, “A Failure’s True Power,” offers the battle in the arena between Naruto and Neji, where everyone is stunned to witness Naruto’s triumphant comeback after near-certain defeat, and the aforementioned exchange between the two combatants over the role of destiny in one’s victory.

Episode 124, “Wild Beast Explosion! Like a Bullet Fired to Pierce!,” offers ninja student Rock Lee in full “drunken kung fu” mode after mistaking a bottle of sake for medicine and then taking on the vicious Sound Village ninja, Kimimaro, in a large field. Lee employs moves and vocal cries clearly patterned after those of kung fu star Bruce Lee (1941–73).

Co-character designer Tetsuya Nishio also designed characters for Jin-Roh, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex: Solid State Society. He was an animation director on Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and key animator on Jin-Roh, Millennium Actress, and The Cat Returns.

Naruto is based on a continuing manga series written and drawn by Masashi Kishimoto.

Naruto began manga publication in Japan in 1999 and English publication through Viz Media in August 2003, two years before the series premiered on the Cartoon Network, and became one of the best-selling manga series published in English. On average, the English-language volumes have come out three to four months apart (volume 12 released in December 2006), so the anime episodes running on Cartoon Network quickly caught up to the manga.

The Naruto animated series was also licensed by Viz Media and began airing in North America on the Cartoon Network on September 10, 2005. The voice dubbing was far better than average for a series of this type, with Maile Flanagan capturing all the nuances of Naruto’s fierce adolescent willpower and his gradual gain in confidence over the course of several dozen episodes. CN’s cablecast of Naruto came after thousands of fans in the U.S. had already become familiar with the series through Web sites and the manga, creating a readymade fan base. Naruto became one of CN’s biggest ratings successes and, aside from minor edits, ran relatively unaltered in its Saturday night primetime showings.

As of publication, only the first Naruto movie has been released in the U.S. In a stark break from the neo-feudal village setting of the TV series, the characters are seen watching a black-and-white samurai movie in a theater and then visiting the filmmakers and stars at a movie studio in a modern urban setting. The other movies also take the characters away from their familiar mythical universe, to diminished dramatic effect.

With episode 53, “Long Time No See: Jiraiya Returns!,” the Cartoon Network showings of Naruto began to include the original Japanese opening theme songs, starting with “Haruka Kanuta,” by Asian Kung-Fu Generation. Prior to that, a new theme song composed for the English dub was used: “Rise,” by Jeremy Sweet and Ian Nickus. (The Sweet and Nickus end music has continued to be used on CN.) As of publication there were nine different opening theme songs used in the Japanese run of Naruto and fifteen different end themes by a wide range of Japanese rock groups.

Many character names in Naruto come from Japanese literature and folklore, and some, like Sasuke and Sarutobi, were long associated with ninja manga and anime. Sarutobi Sasuke, in fact, was the name of a popular ninja character featured in children’s stories, manga, and anime over several decades.

violence Lots of punching, kicking, and blasts of chakra. People do get maimed and injured and die, often in scary ways (e.g., Gaara’s “sand coffins”). Comparable to the violence levels of the hand-to-hand combat in Dragon Ball Z, including bloodshed, but minus the mass urban destruction. Cartoon Network edits of violence were surprisingly minimal.