BODY: Masashi Kishimoto has spent three decades being asked where Naruto came from. At New York Comic Con on October 10, he answered by handing his own series over to the manga that made it possible.
Announced as part of a sprawling new initiative called PROJECT RASENGAN, NARUTO × NINKŪ is a four-episode original anime crossing Konoha's Team 7 with the world of Kōji Kiriyama's Ninku, a martial-arts-meets-ninja series that ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1993. The premise: Naruto is separated from Sasuke and Sakura during a mission and finds himself in Ninku's world, where he meets its protagonist Fūsuke and his companions. Both creators are credited as full supervisors on the original story.
The production lineup is deliberately loaded. Studio Pierrot is animating, with Noriyuki Abe directing and Tetsuya Nishio on character designs — both veterans of the 1990s Ninku anime as well as the Naruto franchise. Junko Takeuchi returns as Naruto, and Rica Matsumoto reprises Fūsuke, the role she played three decades ago. FLOW, long associated with the TV series' openings, is reportedly handling theme songs.
The bigger headline for manga readers landed in the same breath: Kishimoto is drawing a new Naruto manga, NARUTO: SHADOW RISING. The teaser visual shows Team 7 reunited — Naruto with the Hokage hat, Kakashi grinning, Sasuke in profile, Sakura cradling a baby — against the Hokage monument mid-carving. No serialization details yet.
Also under PROJECT RASENGAN: a global Naruto card game launching June 2027 with preview events from February, a worldwide release for the China-hit mobile title Kage Shinobi MOBILE, and the long-gestating Hollywood live-action film under director Destin Daniel Cretton. Full broadcast details arrive at Jump Festa 2027, held December 19–20 at Makuhari Messe.
The insider take
To Japanese readers of a certain age, this is not a random mashup — it's a debt being paid in public. Ninku is a specific mid-90s Jump memory, the kind of series fans of that era defend fiercely and almost nobody outside Japan has read, since it never got a meaningful English release. Kishimoto's line at the stage — "Without Ninku, Naruto wouldn't exist" — reads in Tokyo less as promo copy than as an acknowledgment long assumed by readers who noticed the shared ninja-with-attitude DNA. That Nishio designed characters for both shows makes the lineage literal rather than thematic. Expect Japanese fans to treat this as a gift and international fans to spend the next two months discovering what Ninku even is.
Originally reported by コミックナタリー - 最新ニュース (Japanese).