Boruto: Naruto Next Generations Review

The premise is legitimately good. A son resenting a father who is absent because he is the Hokage is a sharper starting point than the original's orphan loneliness, and the Momoshiki arc's flash-forward promises a story with an ending in mind. Getting there takes years. The early run is village-life filler, academy episodes, and cases of the week with no bearing on anything, while Pierrot's schedule shows in flat compositing, static conversation scenes, and choreography that recycles the same three cuts.

Boruto himself is written as a less interesting Naruto with fewer obstacles, since he has money, a family, and a mentor from episode one, which drains the inherited-expectation idea of most of its friction. Kawaki is the sequel's best addition and arrives roughly two hundred episodes late. When the show commits, as in the Kara arcs and the Isshiki confrontation, guest animators deliver sequences that stand with anything in the franchise. That gap between the occasional peak and the weekly baseline is the entire review.