Ah Naruto. The anime adaptation of Masashi Kishimotos long running shounen manga finally ends though on the backend of some light novel adaptations and only a couple of weeks before the anime original Boruto anime starts but I digress. Busting into the 2000s alongside One Piece and Bleach as one of the Big 3 Naruto has been a phenomenon in the anime industry as one of the best selling manga of all time and one of the exceptionally long running shows in the mainstream ending at a total of 720 episodes. Now its hard to talk about Naruto critically without offending anyone. On one hand you have its diehard fans who cannot bear to fault it for anything and on the other hand you might have some naysayers who will claim that it has no merit whatsoever. I may be conveniently generalizing but I think there is certainly some dissonance between people who love it and people who think its just absolute trash. I personally did not grow up with it like I did Dragon Ball for example so there is no nostalgia factor for me. I started watching it when I was 18 so I cant look at it and feel a magic that I felt from when I was younger however I do understand the sentiment. Discovering a massive bulky fictional universe with an enormous amount of characters is one of the most exciting things for a kid and if Naruto has anything its a bountiful amount of characters and worldbuilding which does stir up the kid in me since I love both of those things. However I can understand the other side who cant ignore a lot of Narutos flaws. Specifically starting with the story of Naruto Shippuden since its like an anime branding sequel to Naruto like how Z was to the original Dragon Ball if you ignore the ridiculous amount of filler between the last arc in the original Naruto anime Sasuke Retrieval and the beginning of Shippuden it started out bombastically. The biggest thing I will give Naruto Shippuden credit for is that aside from filler episodes 1175 were incredibly wellpaced and about as tightly adapted as you could possibly make that portion of the series. It is by far the best part of the anime and it has most of its best moments within this timeframe. I dont really think any of its contemporaries have matched the quality of that stretch either. Now from the start of the Five Kage Summit sigh and onwards Naruto Shippuden really goes through a 250 episode stretch of abhorrent mediocrity if it wasnt filler at the time. Although Five Kage Summit has some good moments its when it gets to The Fourth Shinobi World War Arc where the rest of the show falls flat. This arc is laughably bad for many reasons but on a fundamental level this arc was already awfully drawn out in the manga. You couple that with the anime studio grasping for straws to draw things out either with excessive monologuing or flashbacks so they could schedule their semidecent key animators to work on cuts that fans actually cared about or just outright throwing fillers in the middle of nowhere. There is also the fact that their Ateam who made the beginning of Shippuden so great were busy working on Naruto: The Last and Boruto: Naruto the Movie for most of the duration of this story arc in the anime which are both very well animated movies by the way if you havent watched them yet. I could go on and on about how awful this arc is about how a Naruto Kai couldnt even redeem it or how it makes the entirety of the Naruto anime unrecommendable to someone who hasnt started it but I will leave it at that. For characters theres not much going on here. I will say that the anime is better than the manga at executing emotional moments between characters which is the real strength of Narutos characterizations. Naruto definitely has a plethora of characters and they definitely go through development as in a lot of things happen that dont happen to the average 1326 episode anime character. You have like a bakers dozen or so of characters who go through hundreds and hundreds of episodes full of development. That is a double edged sword on one hand they are defined well. You could leave Naruto pick it up a year or two later and you dont really need to explore their character again if not for a lack of caring. That being said this extensive amount of development will turn a lot of people away since you have this quality vs. quantity factor a lot of people will say that you should be able to execute worthwhile character writing in a much shorter amount of time and that is definitely a fair argument. If you strip the well done emotional execution of particular moments throughout the series and put the characters on paper theres not much going for me. On a thematic level Naruto is back and forth on a lot of things. It definitely lacks subtlety for its messages since its a long running manga it has the liberty of spelling everything out for you. Kishimoto is definitely a sentimental writer who has a lot of ideals about politics and family etc. There are questionable decisions however. Not for a lack of trying the anime does nail thematic execution albeit rarely. Probably my favorite moment in particular was the backstory explaining how Naruto was born. I dont really think you can claim that Naruto is without merit if you dont at least get to this part of the story because its beautiful and well done. Artstyle I wouldnt say its anything special. The characters are definitely defined by design and starting with Shippuden the animation character designs are appealing and consistent especially for the challenge that is long running anime. This is something Pierrot has excelled at in comparison to its biggest competitor Toei Animation. Though this crashes again during the last arc up until the last 20 episodes or so. Naruto can be misleading when it comes to its OPs if youve seen any of them most famously OP 17 / Silouhette by KANABOOM if you havent seen it stop reading this and go watch that right now they are incredibly stylized with beautiful palette choices. If you watch the actual show the colors are very boring. There are moments in the first part of series that I talked about earlier that does some good things with artstyle especially scenery. I really love the way fight scenes looked in Amegakure the directing used the gloomy aesthetic and atmosphere to its advantage. Though it might come to the surprise at some animation is another strong point of Naruto... for the most part. There are definitely some memebetweens as I like to call them Sasukes I CAN SEE YOU or Pains My pain is greater than yours but Naruto Shippudens peaks are surprisingly high quality for a longrunning shounen. There is a lot of material for people who are foaming at the teet for sakuga. Again this quality leaves for the majority for the second half of the show though there are a handful of incredible fight scenes as well. The biggest merit I have for Naruto Shippuden is definitely the music. There are some absolutely iconic anime OSTs on this series such as HeavenShaking Event Sengunbanba Shitsui to name a few. There are so many though and they are used well for sure. If theres a flaw in the soundtrack Id stretch to say that I wish Yasuharu Takanashi made more music to keep the show fresher then again not much could redeem the second half. If you scrolled down just to see my rating youre probably wondering isnt it a waste of time to spend hundreds and hundreds of episodes and rate it that low? Thats a good question. I enjoy anime. When I say there is a lot I dont like about Naruto I enjoy the process of disecting what I dont like about it though the things I do like are just as much there. The amount of pros and cons are balanced whenever I see that happen I think average or mediocre. Though there are moments of Naruto Shippuden that I think are good or great even. It managed to execute several cathartic gripping scenes. Its just that the draggedoutness the excessiveness ruins a lot of that. Though I did enjoy watching it for all its faults I leave it with a