Naruto is about ninjas. It has alot to do with power and obtaining power and such. The villians are people that try to obtain power that they shouldn't have. I love the story of Naruto actually, mainly the pacing at which it develops. Everything is rather slow and expanded which somewhat makes it boring yet at the same time it keeps your attention. A bit like death note, where they make small things seem very significant and go into a ton of details that you supposedly shouldn't care about yet you get into it. The whole purpose of writing this review is to let people know they should watch this, and that Shippuden is soooo much worse. The pacing of Shippuden is done somewhat like Naruto, but they clearly try too hard to make you care, too many characters that later become unimportant. It's hard to pinpoint what exactly, but the main thing is that they try too hard to be like original Naruto, go overboard, and end up boring. I give the story an 8/10 only because sometimes it develops a bit tooo slowly, and 70+ filler episodes isn't exactly my favorite thing, especially since I didn't even realize they were all filler until the end....
Art:
Nothing to talk about. Creative but not beautiful or genius design. They try to make each character different and succeed without seeming too generic. SHIPPUDEN ON THE OTHER HAND, while they succeed in making characters different, some of them are just plain silly. Sometimes the slightly generic quality allows the character to seem normal, but in shippuden characters like killer bee and his annoying rhymes, pain and all those piercings.....you just can't imagine them being in the normal Naruto, right? So in a way, while they are more creative, they don't fit the boundaries of creative and end up unusual, and also take away the character of the show.
Excluding characters, the backgrounds have become extremely lazy, and Naruto also doesn't look badass anymore.
I give the art an 8/10, because there's nothing particularly great or bad in it, but Shippuden is a huge downgrade, and alot of their "creativity" just leads to the show being out of character from the original.
Sound:
Soundtracks are always awesome, both Original and Shippuden. I like quite a few of the openings. 8/10
Character:
It ends up being like a typical anime, where you like the protaganists and dislike the villians. Like I said above, characters are all creative and different but sometimes try a little too hard to do so. I however, think Naruto is totally awesome in the original. Even with his annoying and "knucklehead"-ness it's kind of hard to not like him, especially because of the way they make all his enemies seem like heartless douchebags. SHIPPUDEN ON THE OTHER HAND, turns even the 9-tailed fox into a kids show character(though I suppose it is a kid's show). They (unforgivably), suddenly turn Naruto into the strongest Ninja ever, first making him a rather normal/strong ninja due to tons of training, and then adding on weird powers like sage mode and bijuu mode or something. Maybe if they added less crazy, new level-up-like, abilities and just focused on making him more special instead of all those rasengans you'd like him a bit more. And everytime they focus on sasuke they just make him out to be more of an idiot. The fact that he's even getting stronger in the first place annoys me a ton. Worst of all is gonna have to be the development in all the hokages/hoshikages/etc. i don't even know the names but you know what i mean.....they all end up weaker than naruto(?) and characterless lame-os that somehow end up working together? I don't understand, but I think they're thrown in simply because the world of Naruto has them. So back to the original, it's hard to dislike any main characters/protaganists, but very often they have trouble developing the character and sometimes just throw them in the background to do the main character's dirty work. HOWEVER, there are great moments, like in the sasuke retrieval arc, where each ninja does his own thing and it's just really awesome. I give characters 8/10, because they are inconsistent, but when it's good it's good. In shippuden it's basically never good.
Enjoyment:
IT'S ENJOYABLE. IT'S FUNNY/DRAMATIC/AWESOME/EXCITING. WATCH IT. Shippuden on the other hand completely lacks the funny part(they still try), the drama is unnecessarily silly, the awesomeness is pretty much all gone, and rarely things are exciting because all the battles are focused on silly details no one cares about. 9/10 for original
Overall: 9/10. Everyone should watch this anime, despite it's not-so-good parts simply because it's friggin Naruto. And I can't stress more that Shippuden is a complete failure and that if it somehow kept to the original characterwhile developing it might've become one of the best anime out there
