Overall: Naruto had the setup to be something epic, though the length and the way they tell the story completely destroyed what chance they had at becoming epic. They dragged out the story to include useless extra stuff, and though the characters had some depth, they kept trying to add more depth and not really adding much at all, just wasting time. The whole of Naruto is filled with episodes where you dont really get anywhere both in character development and story development, even the non-filler episodes did not do that well in developing the series in general. I admit, I liked watching Naruto at first, when I didnt really have much experience with much anime, now I look back and man does it look like crap compared to things like Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion or Tengen Toppan Gurren Lagann, or even Black Lagoon, I can understand why people that are fresh into anime are easily turned into "Narutards" now, just like the "Pokemaniacs" back in the day. This series is on a path that leads to a "Inuyasha" kind of standing.
Story: Kid wants to be mayor of ninja town, ok thats nice, but has he REALLY gotten much further to ACTUALLY becoming "Hokage" in the last 200+ eps of this roundabout story? fillers killed what little naruto had in story. The way they stretched the story to encompass EVERY LITTLE THING is its main flaw, little side stories are nice and everything, but if you overdo it, you are just adding a giant mass of fat to the bone, no meat. If they just made Naruto something like a 2 season shot or something less then 50 episodes, then there might have been an epic anime that is worthy of being in the group of truly great anime.
Art: meh... its not anywhere near as impressive as Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex with its 30million yen budget per episode, but it at least doesnt have any major flaws, though the art seems pretty bland sometimes, other times, the art is overly complex for what they are trying to show, but usually there isnt much of a problem in art.
Sound: i never really liked the kind of atmosphere that the background music made me feel, it wasnt epic, the background music didnt really fit the situations very well, for example the overpowering flute in most of the bmg and the apparent manly "HUA!" that is overused do not really set much of a mood, I understand that there is a theme towards more traditional Japanese type of music, but it doesnt work well in many cases, there are way too many times where it just wont set the mood right and they beat the crap out of the dead horse, its hard to explain very well, Im raising my score to a 5 because AKFG and Sambomaster sang openings for it and they worked well with the anime.
Character: There is a very large cast in Naruto, though its usually a bad thing, they made it work somewhat. Even though the characters are somewhat deep, they all consist of cliched stereotypical shonen characters and do not have much to set them apart from the giant mass of other shonen story characters, also nothing EVER changes in the personality of the main character, Naruto, though he is cheerful, optimistic and energetic, he never realizes the reality he lives in and due to a lot of dumb luck and his gift of insane power he passes all his trials and tribulations, he is so naive that it is painful to watch, he almost never has a mature or realistic look on things, EXCEPT FOR HIS FEUD WITH SASUKE, even then he still does not have a mature attitude in many situations. His development is like Arika in "Mai-Otome", painfully naive, though he doesnt even advance as far as Arika in maturing, at least she somewhat matured throughout the story. There are good characters in the mix, for example, Shikamaru and Garaa are pretty well developed characters that have promise. However with all that said, Naruto kills EVERYTHING in character, its amazing how dumb he is sometimes, dumb to the point where he should get himself checked for mild autism, unfortunately he usually blocks out the possibility of good mature side characters with his obnoxiousness. I guess there was more then one reason people tended to stay away from Naruto, besides the fact he has a fire fox's spirit sealed within him.
Enjoyment: it was enjoyable when I started watching it and it stayed that way for about 100 episodes, then it just tanked... now I have no intention of taking this up again. The amount of entertainment is not enough to keep me interested, nothing like Detective Conan, which nearly only uses its entertainment value to keep me interested.
