The End of Naruto: A Series of Highs and Lows

Earlier this year I watched the final battle between Naruto and Sasuke from Naruto shiin. I had long since fallen off the ninja bandwagon and had barely touched the

series

in over a decade, but seeing it come to an end this year, I was curious to see what the final encounter looks like in animated form I'm not sure which I expected, but what I saw surprised me, that is, because it was really great, the animation was beautiful, the color design was solid and the editing was tight and you could see the fight. Flowing from a ninja battle to a giant monster fight to just two old former allies beating each other up was oddly nostalgic and I'm not saying it's the biggest fight in anime.

I don't even think it's the biggest fight in Naruto, but this final showdown between the two childhood friends hit me on an emotional level that I wasn't expecting and managed to close out Naruto's story in a way that I just didn't get from the manga. This is not a ringing endorsement for Naruto or the 654 episodes of it. but I was curious to dive back into the world of ninja and explore his place within the industry, as well as his decline in popularity over time. Many people asked me to make a Naruto video along the same lines.

I did my Fall of Bleach video well. I'm sure a video like that would get a lot of traffic when you watch the two

series

side by side, the comparison just isn't there to begin with if we take a look at the ranking displayed and jump. The data specifically what we're talking about in the Bleach drop video is this section right here, this meteoric drop in popularity, and in comparison, Naruto didn't really suffer a drop as much as it did a gentle decline. Naruto's sales never fell below one million per year during its publication and it even vastly outsold its rival One Piece overseas, and perhaps most importantly, author Masahi Kishimoto has gone on record as saying he was able to finish the manga in his terms the way I wanted, which is a much better fate than Whatever Happened to Bleach?

But that being said, I still think there's a story here after all. Naruto in its 14 years has become a giant of merchandise and sales. Kishimoto's net worth is estimated at a staggering $20 million and the series has become synonymous with anime and manga. which is regularly referenced in other media and whose total global sales exceed X-Men, Captain America and even Dragon Ball Z, even anecdotally, for years you couldn't go to any convention around the world without seeing numerous headbands from Leaf Village or Akatski layers. mistake Naruto is a full-blown global phenomenon, but having said all that, it's hard to ignore the fact that it's lost some of its momentum over its 14-year run, while it's head and shoulders above Bleach in terms of raw success, too.

It is very far from its rival One Piece. While Naruto is more successful in sales overseas, there are over 100 million sales separating the two globally and much of its popularity has eroded in the West, losing out to more modern titles like Attack on Titan Tokyo Ghoul and Hau, both of which outsold Naruto in 2015. Even though Bonds' tank was still being released, I have three questions: what made Naruto so popular in the first place, what explains its gradual erosion of popularity, and finally , what kept him suffering the same fate as Bleach, well, friends, we are. I'm going to answer all of those questions, so sit back, relax, and let's talk about the ending of Naruto.

A series of ups and downs. Naruto began publishing in 1999 in Shonen Jump magazine and when you look at the three best jump series of that era, there is one distinction that Naruto has is that it focused intensely on its characters as opposed to its Yu-Gi-Oh plot. it's about card games, one piece is about adventure and aara a go is about well, the series focused so much less on the idea of ​​being a ninja. since it was about what it meant to be a ninja for his different characters and for our main character, Naruto Uzumaki, it was a way to prove his worth to a society that feared and despised him, that is, because he was possessed by the dangerous Nine tails fox. demon and this was a powerful message to send to Young Shonen Jump readers: you may not fit into society yet, but through hard work and mastering your own potential.

Everything is possible. A lot has been said about Naruto and his rival and also the secondary main character, Sasuke IA. and while I have to say I don't particularly like either character, at least they both have defined personalities and core motivations, where the two characters really start to work is in how they play off each other and watch the two young ninja try it out. and improving each other makes up some of the most entertaining parts of the entire series; In fact, the first time Naruto achieved the number one spot in Shonen Jump's weekly rankings was the memorable chapter in which the two compete to leave the highest mark on a tree.

It's one of the only manga from that year to topple a piece from its throne outside of the main cast, and it's where you'll find one of Naruto's greatest strengths: its raft of likable and secondary supporting characters, many of whom are arguably more interesting. than the three main characters. They come with their own unique abilities, fighting styles and backstories, no matter who you are or what kind of character you like, here you will find at least one character you can relate to, whether it's the gentle but amazing Hinata, the laid-back but infinitely cool. Kakashi or the talentless one who I will love for the rest of my days Rock Lee.

One thing he really helped was the distinctive and memorable design of each character. They all came with bold and expressive color palettes, from Naruto's bright orange jumpsuit to G.'s striking suit of red hair, each character cut a unique and stylish silhouette enhanced by some cool and memorable outfits that were packed with all of these. little character details, it feels like a lot of work went into making each individual design feel distinct and expressive, I mean, even looking at all the different ways Kishimoto found for each ninja to wear their iconic headband is actually pretty clever. .

All of this came together to give the series a great look and resulted in some of the most charming and memorable tankobon covers in the industry, as well as greatly improving the visuals. aesthetics of the tv show talking about the tv show when the

naruto

anime wants it looks really great and not just good tv but a good look at this animation and this really helps sell a lot of the more intense encounters granted. the animation only appears for a small percentage of the show, but when it does it's absolutely beautiful. The most prominent place you'll find these fantastic animations is in the intensely imaginative and often quite violent fight scenes.

The match was never really a case of who is stronger. but more who is more intelligent, who is more creative and who is better prepared, were also on a much smaller scale than the average shown in the series. The attacks tended to be smart and focused as opposed to the usual excessive displays of force and this gave the fights a certain intimacy not found in other shows. One of Kishimoto's main strengths is incorporating the characters' emotions and narratives into his fights. There are a lot of great fights I could point out here, but the highlight for me has always been Rock Le versus gar of the Chunian team. exam I think the real beauty of this fight is how it is a clash of each respective character's ideology, such as Take Rockle, who was born without any aptitude for using magical ninja weapons or illusion techniques and has poured his heart and soul into mastering the Simple melee Tai Jutsu. combat, he is essentially the mail boy of the phrase hard work beats talent, when talent doesn't work hard, then you have G, the cold and unfeeling natural genius and possessor of the evil Tanuki spirit that al

lows

him to effortlessly control massive amounts of grit watching Le fight to not only G, but his own limitations are almost inspiring and elevate the fight far above your average Shonen fight, rather than becoming a desperate battle of spirit versus natural talent, if not you lose your mind when Lee blurts out the then I don't know.

What to tell you, I'm not sure we can be friends, so with so many things going for him, where did Naruto start to go downhill? what caused him to start losing popularity. I think the best way to answer that question is to split it into two parts. manga and anime and since it all started with manga, what We Begin says there, but first I'd like to address an idea that seems to come up in the anime manga community every few months and that's the main reason. a series rejects is because an author is too lazy to remedy this.

I want you to join me for a little thought experiment. You are a young and talented manga author entering Shonen Jump for the first time. You spend weeks on your first chapter drafting and rewriting every sing-along on the panel and every line of dialogue is crisp and punchy until you finally take it to the higher-ups at Jump and they give you a ton of notes and revisions, you spend weeks more honing your mind to reach perfection until it is finally accepted and you are a published author in shown and skipped, congratulations, all the pain and suffering was worth it, but now, instead of having weeks to craft a new chapter, you have only seven days, a small fraction of what it took to make chapter one and the same by the deadline. after that and the next and the next and the next until you get sick canceled or die after months of this you are physically and creatively exhausted your drawing quality decreases and you are using all the tropes of storytelling against what you always criticized and see how your precious manga is filled with filler arcs of long-lost ancestors and plot solutions just to give you enough time to stay ahead of deadlines and imagine yourself doing all this while enduring the death march 24/7 week. drawing, writing and inking, in other words, being a manga author is difficult, very, very, very difficult.

One Piece: Oda recently posted a job ad for an assistant and said that the applicant must be ready and I quote: die for One Piece and even Kishimoto himself got married in 2003, but went on his honeymoon 11 years later, in 2014, after Naruto concluded that this is the life of the author of the weekly Shonen Jump manga. This punishing existence affects each manga in different ways, but in general, whatever your weakness is as a manga author. What will come to the fore for Kubo was his character writing and for Kishimoto it is his ability to draw. I would never suggest that Kishimoto is bad at drawing, that is objectively false, but of the three great originals I would consider him artistically the weakest even at his best.

The best of his drawings do not have the natural quality and delicacy of bleach nor do they have the eccentric energy and hit in one piece and this would only become more frequent over time. Here's one of the first pages of Naruto and, although I don't. I necessarily think it's on par with Kubo or Oda, there's no denying the energy and excitement of each page and here are some later pages in Naruto shiden and while they are certainly functional and get their message across, there is a significant drop in the gestural energy and detail of each character and after doing some research, I think there are three distinct factors that led to this, on the one hand, while Kishimoto drew a lot as a child, unlike Kubar Oda who seems to be drawing his entire life.

There's an old interview where Kishimoto talks about how he stopped drawing for a period of time to pursue sports like baseball and basketball, and it was actually only upon seeing the movie poster for the movie Acura that he rejoined his life. He somehow explains the gap. between his abilities and those of his rivals, this slight weakness in drawing would eventually lead him to need to redesign many characters to make them easier to draw and the first time he did this was in the first draft of the first chapter he chose to change the glasses of Naruto for the now iconic headband, while that particular detail became significant to the plot and actually worked out for the better.

Many of the redesigns that came later in Shian really downplayed the expressiveness that made the originals so great. much later, when many of the Ninjas began using the standard ninja SWAT unit form, completely losing any semblance of originality in their design. Oh, and fun fact, most of these redesigns were inspired by the aesthetic of the first Matrix movie. Lastly, I have to start off and say that this is pure speculation on my part, but I have a feeling that towards the end of the shipin Kishimoto was probably writing a lot less manga than we might think and I say this after reading the sequel manga . to Naruto boruto, which is drawnin its entirety by kish oto main assistant mikio kimoto this is a page from early

naruto

this is a page from later chipen and this is a page from boruto and to me it seems like there are a lot more visual similarities between these two What is between these two, further supporting this when asked in an interview to please continue drawing the manga, Kishimoto responded that he was not physically capable and that if the creation of the manga had taken its toll on him to the point that it was affecting their health, which is very, very, very common among manga.

It would make sense for him to rely more and more on his help for the later parts of the series. This isn't so much laziness as an industry refusing to acknowledge limitations. of the human body, the 14-year routine would also take its toll on Naruto's story. I actually really enjoy the first 134 odd episodes of Naruto, sure there are parts that go on longer than they should, but the arcs all feel distinct and memorable and there's something great about it. The encounters there, the problem would come later in Naruto Shien, when the focus of the story shifted from a group of children learning to be ninja to a group of teenagers simply being ninja.

Many of the themes of the series, such as growing up working hard and mastering your own potential, disappeared in favor of lineage techniques, cumbersome and overly complicated lore, and an ever-growing cast of uninteresting characters. The post-time jump also focused more on Naruto and Sasuke individually and again I think these characters work better together, but when alone they are much less interesting. Power level escalation also became an issue with the series as Naruto and Sasuke progress in strength. it pushes much of the supporting cast into the background as they simply cannot keep up with the main characters and thus lose their ability to matter in the overall story, the piccolo effect as I like to call it. characters like Rockley and Sakura were tragically left in the dust and this really sucks because a lot of the charm of the beginning of the series was watching each individual Ninja's unique approach to combat and as the series went on it's like they drifted further away. of this style and subsequent encounters were felt.

Closer to the giant, clumsy battles of Mecca than anything resembling these more intimate, small-scale ninja fights that were initially so compelling. Naruto's character, Arc, also presents some long-term problems, mainly because since chapter 1 his main motivation is to be recognized by the Konoha village. and he achieves this after defeating pain in chapter 449, the only major story point left is the confrontation between Naruto and Sasuke and since Sasuke had already fulfilled his main motivation by killing Itachi. The logical narrative conclusion at this point would be to have them both. confront and end the series, however, by now Naruto was already a full-fledged global phenomenon, so in the eyes of Shonen Jump management, the end was not an option, this led to the boring e bloated ninja war AR that, instead of being based on the characters, was based much more on the cumbersome and uninteresting story of Naruto's World, although it has some really surprising moments, neither the kaga nor the madmen are that interesting as villains and this is a big problem because if the 40 or so people I interviewed for this video or anything similar caused a large portion of the fanbase to abandon the series, which is a real problem because when you look at that Arc in general, it spans more than a third of the entire manga, the anime came with its own set of problems.

I've already mentioned that when the anime kicks into high gear it looks amazing, but the problem is that this really only makes up about 5-10% of the show overall. The problem with Naruto is that the animation can be very, very lame at times. and when you combine this with the much simpler redesigns of naruto shien, you can get shots with a fairly flat and soft feeling. The other major problem with the anime is its chalk full of filler, in case you don't know, it's material added to the anime. is not part of the original manga and is done because a single manga chapter is usually not enough material to fit into a 22 minute animated episode and since they both have a weekly schedule, even if the manga starts much earlier than the anime, it is inevitable. that the anime will catch up and thus a studio faces going on hiatus and potentially losing much of its staff or adding new filler material from a different writer to give the manga a chance to move forward.

The filling tends to be quite low. quality, as whoever writes it has their hands tied by the fact that they can't kill anyone, can't make any significant changes to the characters in the world, and must conform to what I assume are some pretty strict narrative guidelines, since everything has to end as it began so as not to disrupt continuity every time the story returns to Cannon and it's truly amazing how much of the entire Naruto anime is filler. This bar features the 654 currently aired episodes of Naruto and Naruto shien and these red sections represent each part of the series that is filler, which is a whopping 42% of the entire show, a staggering 254 episodes, meaning that if you watched the entire Naruto in its entirety, you would consume approximately 104 hours of what it is essentially.

High budget, highly regulated Naro fanfiction and not even nice people like, I mean, God, you could watch all of Hunter x Hunter one and a half times the time it would take you to just watch Naruto filler, think about that and go Let's see Hunter. x Hunter, some guy made a video about it. I think when you take all of this into account, it's easy to see why Naruto had a steady decline in popularity; However, despite all this, the series never fell below number three in the annual rankings and above that Naruto was still very much a figurehead who showed up and jumped around regularly occupying its cover until and beyond. its conclusion and was still a big part of their crossover merchandise, so what was it that kept Naruto from suffering the same fate as Bleach, if I had to think?

About the two series as a whole, my answer would be that it's because Naruto and Sasuke grew up. What I mean by this is that no matter how slowly Naruto's story could progress, it always progressed. Things changed, alliances were formed and divided. Characters aged, died, and fell in love, there were monumental changes to the landscape of the Naruto world and every character was affected by them, so I think the reason Naruto was able to retain a large portion of its audience is because the History never stopped, it just slowed down if you look. In Bleach's overarching story at the end of each arc, the universe basically reboots and everything goes back to the way it was only for a new, completely unrelated threat to emerge in its place, whereas with Naruto you can follow a logical, if not elegant, line . from chapter 1 to chapter 700 and I think that's why those last few episodes had the effect on me, they did everything you can think of about Naruto in general, when you watch that final encounter you get this very real feeling that it's been a Monumental Journey that has brought these two characters to this point and the thing is that it is really 14 years old, in fact I was a teenager when I read Naruto for the first time and a lot of things have changed in my life since then and it is really nostalgic to see the same reflected. on two characters that at one point I really cared about because there was a time in my life where Naruto was my favorite series and this last final encounter reminded me why it was that way and I really can't give it any more praise than that.

I recommend that you go back and watch or read all of Naruto, not at all, it's too big, it's too long and it's too much of a commitment, but that being said, if you had or have any fun in your life with the series then I encourage you to go . Go back and watch those last few episodes, trust me, you'll be glad you did folks, this comes to an end, another video. A big thank you to my good friend Rebecca, who once again did the fantastic illustrations for this episode. I highly recommend checking out a Tumblr it's really cool.

I want to thank you for joining me today and I really want to thank everyone on Twitter who shared with me their thoughts and feelings about the series in general and if they would like to be interviewed for future videos like this. Then come find me on Twitter at iwolf. Of course, I'll be back soon with another video, but in the meantime, why don't you join me on the Let's Fight a Boss video game podcast as we part ways with Final Fantasy 15, The Last of Us Part Two, and Makoto's Last Movie Shinkai, your name, friends, take care of yourselves and see you next time.