The Last: Naruto the Movie

At our first meeting with Kishimoto-sensei, it was requested that we make Naruto the main character of the movie as opposed to having a guest character for this work. From there, we thought about what Naruto was lacking, and came up with “romantic feelings.” It was decided that we would make Naruto’s last movie a “romance movie” instead of an “action movie.”

First, I received the scarf idea from the scriptwriter, Kyozuka-san, and was extremely pleased. From there, we thought we couldn’t make a story with a scarf as the main item, so we came up with the image of Naruto wearing a red scarf, holding hands with Hinata and sprinting through a space with floating bubbles of light that projected their memories. We thought it would make a beautiful picture to take several flashbacks of the memories of these two, which are also scenes in the memories of Naruto fans, and display them like revolving lanterns. We immediately drew the image board and named this world “the memory space.” For the story of this production, we thought backwards to what kind of episode we ought to make in order to tie to this scene.

We completely changed the visuals from those of previous movies and brushed them up. We made a lot of trouble for our character designers Nishio-san and Suzuki-san by giving them unreasonably demanding orders such as making the head length to body height ratio high.

The colors and art are also new. The Hyuuga residence in particular is an important setting when it first makes its appearance, so using the Hyuuga residence in the original work as a reference, we went on location to an old family mansion and remade the setting. In the scene where Hinata converses with Hanabi, the art is beautiful, and I was pleased with the orange from the lights and the atmosphere like that of “In’ei Raisan.” (Translator’s note: “In’ei Raisan” or “In Praise of Shadows” is an essay on Japanese aesthetics written by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki in 1933.) We tried making the color scheme in the scene where Naruto confesses to Hinata like that of a Gogh painting, with the blue water and the shining golden butterflies.

In the dream scene where Naruto, who is dense about romantic love, realizes Hinata’s feelings, it was interesting to mix up the order of the past episodes and put them together randomly like a puzzle. We thought of many patterns for how to put together the episodes until the current Naruto sees Hinata at the academy writing his name on her paper.

I think it was difficult to come up with images for this work, and we originally created Toneri with an image like that of young Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands. Toneri can’t understand the feelings of others because he lived alone on the moon since he was young, and so he’s a character who lacks romance for reasons different from Naruto’s.

We had the scenario checked by Kishimoto-sensei. I appreciate that amidst being busy with serialization, he kindly gave us various advice. He also wrote some of the important lines such as, “It takes time to knit a scarf.”

By the way, we made sure to show the key shot of Hinata facing sideways. The side-facing heroine is homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s impressively produced “Vertigo” and director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s “Sabishinbou.”

Since this production is Naruto’s last movie, I tried to have fun while looking back on “Naruto’s memories,” then I put my feelings that this would be a work of everyone’s new “memories” into directing. I will be happy if this production always stays in the corner of everyone’s heart as a “memory.”