Masashi Kishimoto is known for his work on Naruto, the blonde ninja who has been cheering and entertaining us with his adventures for almost a decade and a half. Over twenty years after Naruto was first released, we’re used to thinking of him as a stubborn, clumsy ninja who never gives up.
But in the beginning it wasn’t quite like that. For real, Naruto wasn’t even human. The story of the self-contained chapter that gave rise to Naruto’s actual manga was actually a completely different one. The setting saw no special references, if not to the Nine-Tails Fox, a being that was therefore always present and was actually the protagonist at first.
In fact, in Naruto’s oneshot, that’s the one the protagonist was a small nine-tailed fox who could transform into a blond boy and with glasses on his forehead. His story was highly valued and allowed Kishimoto to work on a serialization, but the mangaka reflected on the difficulty of creating a non-human character as the protagonist in which it might be difficult to identify. So began a series of changes in the plot that led to the product that debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1999.
Kishimoto has written many oneshots throughout his career, many based on old ideas and prior to the release of his great work.
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