You Best Believe I’m Fixin A Plate For Boruto’s Dad’s Godfather, Ninku

Before Naruto pulled up to the function, its social media account gassed up its New York Comic Con announcement as a can’t-miss event. At Comic Con, it announced a new manga series by creator Masashi Kishimoto, as well as an anime collab with Ninku. That’s an anime plenty of Western fans—myself included—had never heard of, and it felt left-field as hell. That is, until folks realized Naruto owes its whole flow to that old, obscure anime. 

Initially, the Naruto x Ninku anime collab took the wind out of a lot of Naruto fans’ sails. For the Boruto faithful, it felt like a rug pull on any hopes that the anime would continue adapting a manga arc I’ve been told is actually quite good. For others, it was a swerve from the remastered (and long delayed) episodes of Naruto meant to celebrate the series’ 20th anniversary…in 2023. As far as anime fans knew, Studio Pierrot had spoiled their fun by not dropping a Dragon Ball Super: Beerus/Moro Arc-esque anime announcement for the orange ninja, instead introducing a collab with a character and franchise no one had ever heard of. 

But during the trailer, Kishimoto said that, “Without Ninku, there would be no Naruto. I wanted to read more of Ninku, so I started drawing Naruto. And then the dream became reality.” 

For a time, Naruto fans thought Kishimoto’s series was a mainstream riff on Yoshihiro Togashi's banner shonen series Hunter x Hunter. Both series follow a rambunctious, tracksuit-wearing orphan kid through a series of tournament arc/death game challenges to become a James Bond-type citizen alongside an edgy rival he’s totally not gay for. Add a white-haired mentor guy and a power system with episodes dedicated to explaining how everything works, and you wouldn’t have to squint hard before the orange tracksuit bled into a green one. 

Kishimoto pretty much admitted the Hunter x Hunter inspiration himself in a 2009 sit-down with Togashi for Naruto’s 10th anniversary. Now that Ninku has willed its way back into the mainstream through collaborations, fans have a new anime godfather to appreciate in far less cynical terms than they did with HxH. 

Throwback: "Ninku" Opening animated by Tetsuya Nishio (1995).

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— Catsuka (@catsuka.bsky.social) October 11, 2026 at 4:06 AM

Ninku, created by mangaka Koji Kiriyama, was an adventure comedy series published in Shonen Jump. The series follows a group of ninjas with elemental powers who fight one another. At the center of it all was a funny-looking 12-year-old boy named Fusuke, who travels the world with his friends to stop an imperial army from ruling it. Somewhere along the line, elemental-powered dragons, from which its ninja derived their powers, come into the mix. But for Kishimoto’s purposes, Fusuke’s wind-centric abilities made the perfect template for what would become Naruto’s patented Rasengan, as well as the series’ old reliable substitution jutsu. Unfortunately, as Kishimoto notes, Ninku wasn’t long for this world. 

Unlike Naruto’s whopping 700 chapters, Shonen Jump suspended Ninku in 1994 with only 53 chapters under its belt. The series made a brief return with 27 more chapters in a sequel five months later, and an anime a couple of years later by Studio Pierrot (Naruto’s animation studio), but after 55 episodes, the show fell into obscurity. That is, until NYCC’s announcement pulled it from the annals of history with an anime collab between both series’ anime studios, supervised by Kishimoto and Kiriyama themselves. Now, the anime community had a godfather anime series for their favorite of the big three, one that Naruto resembles more than its previous surrogate father, HxH. 

I wasn’t entirely in the dark about what Ninku was; I just didn’t experience it as a painfully obvious Naruto progenitor. My first exposure to the show was—like many fans pointed out on Twitter—in a “blink, and you’ll miss it” train ad in a Yu Yu Hakusho episode. Like many others, I didn’t think much of it at the time. Fast forward to today, and it’s a cool full-circle moment that fans have quickly embraced. 

One of my favorite parts of rediscovering retro media is discovering how it indelibly influenced my favorite anime. Who would Shinichiro Watanabe’s space cowboy, Spike Spiegel, be without the laissez-faire performance of Elliott Gould’s gumshoe, Philip Marlowe, in Robert Altman’s 1973 film The Long Goodbye? Neon Genesis Evangelion without the cocktail of Go Nagai’s Devilman, Mobile Suit Gundam, and 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or if Avatar: The Last Airbender creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko had not drunk from the well of Studio Ghibli and Moebius before pioneering their own imaginative series?

I experienced a microcosm of that when I interviewed Vinland Saga mangaka Makoto Yukimura for 90 minutes. In our chat, I asked him what series inspired his pacifist Viking epic, and his answer surprised me: Fist of the North Star. His inspiration didn’t come from his love of Kenshiro punching folks to death, but from an odd moment in the show where its wandering hero wasn’t very nice to an old man:

Just when he was about to pass away, the old man says to Kenshiro, “Please bring these grains of rice back to the village so people don’t have to fight over food anymore.”
What does Kenshiro do? He did not bring the grains of rice back to the village and start growing them! (Laughs) I could not believe this. When I read these chapters of Fist of the North Star, I was maybe six or seven years old. I was thinking, “Why Kenshiro? Why didn’t you stop by and bring the grains back to the village, make a rice field, and bring water? This could really have changed the outlook of this society! For Kenshiro being such a strong man, why didn’t he do this?” I really didn’t understand why this was the case, and for some 20-some years, I had this question within me, which brought me to writing the story of Vinland Saga. I don’t want any confusion, but I do really like Fist of the North Star, though.

Discovering that a mega popular series like Naruto gets to have its creator collab with the creator and studio who inspired Kishimoto to create in the first place is an infectiously cool sight to behold. 

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