Kishimoto

Since I was a child, I have had a strong interest in painting. In his own words, he became obsessed with it. After entering high school, Saitoshi Kishimoto began collecting Weekly Shonen Jump manga published by Shueisha, which gave him the idea of becoming a manga artist. In his early years, he was deeply influenced by "Seven Dragon Balls", "Hokuto Shinken", and "Doraemon", and admired Akira Toriyama, Tetsuo Hara, and Fujiko F. Fujio. Graduated from Kyushu Sangyo University. Once aspired to create martial arts manga, but gave up and turned to ninja manga due to the release of Rurouni Kenshin and Infinite Dweller. The first manga he drew, Sunburn, was a short story featuring a teenage ninja.

In 1996, he made his debut with "Robot", which won the 132nd February issue of the "Hop☆Step Award". The following year, he published a short story in Akamaru Jump in 1997, and from 1999 to November 2014, he serialized Naruto in Weekly Shonen Jump, which was anime-animated for television (in 2019, the number of distributed volumes exceeded 250 million). The work is also extremely well known outside of Japan, with manga sold in over 23 countries, anime broadcast in over 60 countries, and licenses offered in over 90 countries.

His creative style was influenced by many people, such as Akira Toriyama, Katsuhiro Otomo, Hiroaki Shamura, Tetsuya Nishio, Keiyuki Okuura, and Koji Morimoto. The reason why the character design for the anime version of Naruto is Tetsuya Nishio is Kishimoto's request to use the design plan of the anime version as the drawing material for the manga.