There are a lot of good artists alive today to speak of, but one of my all-time favorites is the artist Masashi Kishimoto. I’ve chosen this artist because anime is watched by millions of people everywhere, and I really like it. I’ve seen around 50-70 different anime and have read around 10-15 and Naruto is by far one of my favorites. Masashi Kishimoto is an inspiration to future anime artist around the world. Kishimoto was born on November 8, 1974 which I find pretty cool because my birthday is on the 10th of November.
As of April 2018, the Naruto manga has sold 235 million copies around the world. The series has been made into two anime and multiple films, video games, and related media. Kishimoto has won an award for Best Graphic Novel and he’s won a Quill Award. During his childhood, Kishimoto was interested in drawing characters from the anime shows he watched, some of the shows being Dr Slump’s, Arale, and Doraeman’s titular protagonist.
In elementary school, Kishimoto started watching the Dragon Ball anime with his twin brother. During the next few years, Kishimoto started idolizing Dragon Ball’s author Akira Toriyama, which is completely understandable seeing how it’s a multi-billion-dollar anime. Then he started enjoying not only his series Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump, but he also started to get into Dragon Quest a role-playing video game for which Toriyama was the art creater. He couldn’t afford to buy weekly magazine the Shonen Jump which published the Dragon Ball manga, instead he barrowed the magazine series from a friend who was also interested in the series.
Around the time of his high school years, Kishimoto started to lose interest in manga as he started playing baseball and other sports, that he participated in at his school. However, after seeing a poster for the animated film Akira (Which is one of my favorite movies of all time, truly amazing), Kishimoto became interested with the way the illustration was made and wanted to imitate the series creator Katsuhiro Otomo’s Style. Around the end of high school, Kishimoto spent most of his time creating manga and went to an art college with the goal that he would become a manga artist. When he entered college, Kishimoto decided he should try creating a Chanbara manga, which is pretty much a sword fighting samurai story, since the weekly magazine Shonen Jump had not yet published a title from that genre yet.
Kishimoto says that he’s never been surprised by manga ever since he read Akira and claims that he still was not able to compete against the Artists who have created them, because they are just too good. I agree as well because Akira and Princess Mononoke are my two favorite anime movies of all time and I’ve watched them each at least 10 times. In his second year of college, Kishimoto started creating manga for magazine contests. He figured that his works were similar to Seinen Manga which is aimed towards a younger adult from 20 to 50 rather than the Shonen Manga that is meant for a younger audience.
His goal was to write a Shonen Manga that was meant for younger people, but Kishimoto found that his style was unsuitable for the magazine. After a while he met Tetsuya Nishio, a designer from the anime and manga Ninku, who he deemed as a big influence. He then started to watch and take notes on how Nishio was drawing his Shonen manga’s and anime, Kishimoto noticed that his style started resembling Shonen series, and that maybe it was time to try again on creating some of his own Shonen Manga’s. This was the beginning of Naruto, one of just a few popular million-dollar anime and manga. After such a rough start trying to get the style of Shonen learned who would figure that he would create one of the best anime ever created. Kishimoto is currenting working on another anime aside from his newly released sequel of Naruto called, Boruto and it is already reaching top ratings and we are excited to see his next creation. There is no doubt that if Kishimoto keeps up his good work that he will be the next Akira. I have attached a few of Kishimoto’s arts to the end of the paper to show off some of his great works.
Masashi Kishimoto Best Anime Artist. (2022, Feb 03). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/masashi-kishimoto-best-anime-artist/