YouTuber Oceaniz edited down the entire “Naruto” series so his girlfriend could have an “easier” viewing experience of the series.
In a 30-minute-long YouTube video uploaded to his official channel on Wednesday, Oceaniz explained to viewers why he started the “Naruto” editing project and the process he went through to finish it.
“Naruto” is a wildly popular anime adapted from the manga of the same name that lasted from 1999-2014. The show is made up of 220 episodes that were originally broadcast in Japan by production companies Pierrot and Aniplex from 2002 to 2007, followed by 500-episode sequel series “Naruto: Shippuden,” which ran from 2007 to 2017. Each episode is around 20 minutes, and the entire series clocks in at around 250 hours total.
Oceaniz says in the explainer video that “Naruto” was an influential series for him growing up, and that when his girlfriend, Laura, ran out of an anime series to watch, he suggested it. The YouTuber explains that many of the massive series’ episodes, however, contained “boring and badly animated” fillers such as long flashbacks and repetitive scenes.
“Entire seasons of filler, 10-minute-long flashbacks, literal hundreds of reaction shots, you name it, ‘Naruto’ did it,” Oceaniz says in the video. “The flashbacks in particular are so bad that certain scenes are shown up to, no joke, 20 different times, with only a fraction of them showing any new information.”
He thus came up with the idea of starting a project where he would re-edit the series into a more compact version without fillers.
The YouTuber edited the English-dubbed version of the series, conjoining around three to six “Naruto” episodes into single 50- to 120-minute episodes he calls “Ocean Cut” episodes. He also translated all the Japanese signs in the series into English, so Laura could better understand the visual element translations as well.
He did, however, keep some filler episodes that he felt were important, such as the “Gotta See! Gotta Know! Kakashi-Senseis’ True Face!” episode, and moved them into a segment he named “Themed Special Episodes.”
Beginning the project in January, Oceaniz finished in mid-March and managed to cut down the entire series to a total of 135 hours. “The Ocean Cut” version includes the entire “Naruto” series storyline without altering the narrative.
The YouTuber hints in his explainer video that his re-edit may also be available for other interested followers to watch on rare occasions through a link on his Twitter page.
“Would I ever do this again? Absolutely not,” Oceaniz says in the video. “I almost know “Naruto” by heart and even so, this was an insane amount of work. Doing this for any series I’m less familiar with would be a nightmare.”
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