Ninjas are always cool, but the recent release of Assassin's Creed Shadows, the long-awaited entry in the franchise that finally allows players to take on the role of an actual ninja, the Internet has had ninjas on the brain a lot lately. With that in mind, now seems like the perfect time to take a look at the most popular ninja-centric anime franchise in the history of the medium.
To briefly recap what we've already talked about in the previous anime recommendations from the Bam Smack Pow team: the three most popular and profitable manga series and their anime adaptations and collectively known as the Big Three. We've posted about two of those three in One Piece and Bleach.
Today, we're closing out our look at the Big Three of anime by taking a look at Naruto. Anime streamer Crunchyroll describes the series like this:
"The Village Hidden in the Leaves is home to the stealthiest ninja. But twelve years earlier, a fearsome Nine-tailed Fox terrorized the village before it was subdued and its spirit sealed within the body of a baby boy."
A hard sell for an iconic series
As popular and iconic a series as Naruto has become, it can actually be a pretty easy series to bounce off of after only a few episodes. To sum up the reason why most simply: Naruto himself can be really, really annoying. In the original Japanese script, Naruto has a very distinct speech patter and uses the Japanese word "dattebayo" as a catchphrase. In the English script, this was represented by having Naruto use the phrase "Believe it!" as often as a real person uses a comma. Luckily, this was eventually toned down in the English translation.
That aside, Naruto himself is still one of the purest examples of the archetypal Shõnen anime protagonist: he's loud, self-confident to the point of arrogance, competitive and driven to be the best and pretty dumb. He also starts the series at 12 years old, which really only compounds all of those issues. That being said, one of the most important aspects of the ongoing plot of the series is how Naruto grows and matures as a person.
There is a lot of good in Naruto, however. Helped by Naruto's growth as both a ninja and a person, the overarching story does have plenty of genuine emotional weight and high stakes. Even within the first season itself, the anime gets into one of its most interesting storylines with the Chūnin Exams. It's a notable story arc that forces the characters to actually act like ninjas. It's a markedly intellectual story arc for an anime as bright and action-oriented as Naruto. Faced with an impossibly difficult written exam and harsh consequences for being caught cheating, the lesson becomes not that cheating is wrong but that they must learn to cheat successfully.
The long-running series also introduces a cast of characters with unique, visually striking designs and powers. Then, of course, it finds reasons to make them fight each other. In that way, there's a pretty easy comparison to Dragon Ball to be made.
The enduring legacy of Naruto
The original Naruto manga is basically contemporary to the other two series of the Big Three, running from 1999 (debuting a couple years after One Piece) to 2014 (ending a couple years before Bleach did). The original Naruto anime series ran from 2002 to 2007. The bulk of the manga's storyline, however, is adapted in the sequel series Naruto: Shippuden, which debuted in 2007 and aired about twice as many episodes as the first anime series.
Before the debut of the sequel series Boruto, there was a series of 11 movies set in the Naruto universe. For the most part, these movies are standalone stories, with the exception of The Last: Naruto the Movie and Boruto: Naruto the Movie, which serve to bridge the gap between the original and the sequel, which follows Naruto's son as he goes through his own ninja training.
The streaming rights to the Naruto franchise vary significantly based on international region. In the United States, Naruto, Shippuden and the first season of Boruto are available to stream on Hulu. The original Naruto and Boruto are available in their entirety on Netflix, along with the first half of Shippuden and the majority of the series's standalone movies. In some international regions, Netflix is the only streaming service where the series is available in an English dub. Various parts of the series are also available to stream on Crunchyroll, Pluto TV and Tubi.
The original Naruto and Boruto manga series are available in their entirety on publisher Shueisha's Manga Plus app and website, as well as international publisher Viz Media's Shonen Jump app and website.
As always, keep following us right here on Bam Smack Pow for all the latest news and hottest content about Marvel, DC, comics and anime!