In order to fully understand the story behind Akkipuden, it is important to understand the context in which Naruto Shippuden came into existence. When one decides to adapt a manga or a comic book into an animated series, it is necessary to leave the paper support a minimum in advance. In the context of Japanese animation, we’re talking about 20 to 25 minute episodes that air every week.
Each episode can cover one to several paper chapters (between 10 and 20 pages in the case of Naruto) and, if we receive a chapter and an episode each week, the animated series will very quickly catch up with the manga. It’s a real headache for new series that are on the rise, but simply can’t enjoy an anime until there are usually at least ten volumes published.
This is for example the case of Kaiju n’8 in 2022. The manga is extremely popular, in Japan how France. We have seen the publishing house Kana resort to a historic advertising campaign, for example by displaying itself on the facade of the François Mitterrand library. The shonen will inevitably appeal to a large community if it is adapted into an animated series, but it must tend.
That wasn’t really the case with Naruto. The anime was developed very quickly when the manga experienced an explosion in popularity in Japan. It should be remembered that at that time, Dragon Ball was over and we were looking for potential successors to boost the sales of Weekly Shonen Jump magazine. Success was immediate with the anime adaptation of Naruto. On the other hand, a few years after its broadcast, from 2005, there was no longer any real margin between the manga and the episodes.
When we reach this level, there are only two possibilities to react: we can suspend the production of new episodes in order to allow the manga to breathe and to propose new chapters. Commercial logic dictates that this would have deprived Japanese industry of millions of yen in revenue. The other solution was therefore to produce special episodes that are also called “fillers”. We have created an article listing all the Naruto special episodes.
For two years, we therefore had to watch episodes every week that told stories that were not present in the manga. Everything was completely made up from A to Z. We can understand that more and more fans started to complain, because the quality of the episodes was on the decline. It was not besides the author of Naruto, Masashi Kishimotowho was behind the scripts.
In 2007, it was decided to produce a new Naruto anime series, Shippuden (疾風伝, meaning “Whirlpool Legend”). The idea was to start off on the right foot with the fans and not to offer special episodes. A few years later, we realize that there have been many filler episodes. Naruto’s popularity has always been high, and today, in 2022, the series has come to an end.