Naruto Grows Older
Amazingly popular anime Naruto has been in filler mode for over a year now. For those who don’t know, filler episodes are made-up stories by the anime production company (although there can be some short fillers made by the manga-ka themselves) to allow the manga storyline some buffer before animating it. This has been controversial in the past, because the quality of the filler storyline is quite often very poor. In the case of the Rurouni Kenshin filler, the popularity of the show decreased to the point where it was cancelled and the animating of the next arc never went ahead.
This Naruto filler has been painful for me. It’s generally a single episode story, maybe extending to three episode long arcs, and are usually very stupid, ie: the punchline is that Naruto farts at the wrong time.
So it’s a huge relief to hear that the filler will end this coming spring! The next arc in the manga will have Naruto two and a half years older - now aged 15! The characters have been redesigned to show their new ages and it’s looking very awesome. This new Naruto will be called “Naruto: Shippuuden” (Naruto: The Hurricane Chronicles) and accompanying it will be yet another animated movie, later this year. Yay!
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