Naruto

Naruto

NARUTO -ナルト-
2002 -2007 Studio Pierrot TV Tokyo 220 episodes Completed
Action Adventure Martial Arts
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Details & Synopsis
Naruto Uzumaki was born on the night the Fourth Hokage sealed the Nine-Tailed Fox inside him to save the village. The village watched the demon go in. It forgot to tell the child what it had done to him. What followed was twelve years of a boy growing up knowing he was hated and not knowing why, loud, relentless, failing every test, eating ramen alone, until the day he graduated dead last from the Academy and became a ninja anyway through sheer refusal to stay down.
That is the premise. What the series becomes is something larger.
Naruto ran for 220 episodes on TV Tokyo from 2002 to 2007, produced by Studio Pierrot from Masashi Kishimoto's manga. The Chunin Exam arc is one of the great tournament sequences in shonen history. Naruto vs. Neji is a thesis statement about fate and effort that the show earns through fifty episodes of buildup before it delivers. The Sasuke Retrieval arc ends on failure, the hero does not get his friend back, does not keep his promise, is found in the dirt by Kakashi while Sasuke walks away, and that failure is the most radical thing a shonen series had done to its protagonist in years.
In the West, Cartoon Network aired a version. That version was not this. The broadcast cut removed blood, altered dialogue, and softened the things the show was specifically built around. The fansub community knew it immediately. ANBU-AonE, the result of a merger between two of the era's most respected groups, became the definitive answer. Their karaoke openings. Their translation fidelity. The weekly releases that IRC rooms and BitTorrent trackers distributed before streaming existed as a concept. Before Crunchyroll. Before legal alternatives. Before anyone in the industry believed Western audiences would watch anime subtitled in volume.
This archive holds the complete ANBU-AonE fansub run, all 220 episodes, the version the community actually watched, the version that built the Western Naruto fandom from the ground up. Not the broadcast. Not the remaster. The original release, as it was distributed, as it was intended.
This is provenance. This is the record.
Alt Title NARUTO -ナルト-
Studio Studio Pierrot
Network TV Tokyo
Aired 2002 - 2007
Episodes 220
Genre Action, Adventure, Martial Arts
Status Completed
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Ranks & Missions

Ninja Hierarchy

How ranks actually work

The rank system looks clean on an Academy poster, but on the field it is messy as hell. Ranks measure administrative clearance, leadership capability, and mission clearance - not raw killing power. A Genin with a Bijuu can still outpunch a Kage on paper. The chart below is the bureaucracy. The war is something else.

Academy Student

Trainee
Learning basic mold mechanics - Transformation, Substitution, and the rest of the Academy toolkit. Not cleared for real missions. The village's farm system for future bodies on the wall.

Genin

Novice · D/C Rank
Basic military foot soldiers. Assigned to three-man cells under a Jonin supervisor. Naruto and Sasuke staying Genin forever is not a joke about their power - it is the show admitting that the paperwork never caught up to the war.

Chunin

Squad Leader · B/C Rank
Tactical field commanders cleared for B and C Rank missions. Promoted through the lethal Chunin Exams based on intellect and decision-making under pressure - not just winning fights. The exam is a filter for who can lead kids into a deathtrap and still bring them home.

Jonin

Elite Specialist · A/S Rank
The absolute backbone of a village's military power. Handles S-Rank assassinations, high-level political defense, and squad leadership. Kakashi, Guy, Asuma - the people who actually keep a Hidden Village standing when the charts stop mattering.

Special Jonin (Tokubetsu)

Niche Expert
Jonin-level specialists in one hyper-specific field. Ibiki in interrogation. Anko as Forest of Death proctor. Not generalists - scalpels the village keeps on retainer for the jobs nobody else is allowed to touch.

ANBU Black Ops

Covert · S-Rank Ops
Masked assassination and intelligence units answering directly to the Kage - or to Root, depending on the era. Cold, disposable, and operating outside ordinary law. The village's conscience gets left at the gate.

Sannin

Mythic Class · Legendary Three
Not an official rank - a title bestowed by Hanzo of the Salamander on Jiraiya, Tsunade, and Orochimaru for surviving his war zone. Bureaucracy cannot invent this. War does.

Kage

Supreme Commander · Country Shield
The absolute military and administrative head of a Hidden Village. The strongest line of defense between peace and total invasion - until the next war proves even that title is just another target painted on a forehead protector.

Mission Grades

What the letter grades mean

Mission ranks are the village's risk ledger - how dangerous the job is supposed to be on paper, and who is cleared to take it. They are not a power-level chart. A C-Rank can become a bloodbath the moment the briefing was wrong. The grades below are the official story. Canon is full of the unofficial endings.

D-Rank

Menial / Errand
Find the lost cat. Dig the ditch. Escort nobody important nowhere dangerous. Academy graduates cut their teeth here so the village can bill civilians without getting its Genin killed. Team 7's early run is almost entirely this - until it isn't.

C-Rank

Low combat risk
First missions where violence is possible: bandits, bodyguard work for ordinary clients, travel outside the walls. Cleared for Genin under Jonin supervision. The Land of Waves job was sold as a C-Rank. That lie is the entire first arc.

B-Rank

Combat expected
Experienced ninja, real opposition, and a briefing that admits someone might die. Chunin territory. Political escort work, skirmishes with rival villages, the jobs where "probably fine" stops being an acceptable risk model.

A-Rank

High stakes
Important people, important secrets, or important corpses. Jonin-level clearance. Assassinations, VIP protection, and the kind of assignment that can start a war if it goes wrong - or end one if it goes right.

S-Rank

Village-critical
The ceiling. Missions that threaten a Hidden Village's survival, national leadership, or the balance between great nations. Only the tip of the roster is cleared - and even then, S-Rank often just means "send whoever can still walk."