What Is Boruto: Naruto the Movie?

Set years after the manga's epilogue, the film centers on Boruto Uzumaki, a prodigy who resents his father's absence behind the Hokage's desk and cheats in the Chunin Exams with a banned device that stores and fires other people's jutsu. The exams are crashed by Momoshiki and Kinshiki Otsutsuki, hunting chakra fruit, and the film's second half becomes a fathers and sons story: Naruto captured, Boruto confronting what his father carried, and a final battle fought by Naruto, Sasuke and a Boruto finally using his own hands.

Kishimoto called the film, in release-era comments, the story he most wanted to tell at that point, and he shaped its screenplay and designs accordingly. It became the highest-grossing film in the franchise in Japan, and its importance outgrew the film line entirely: the Boruto manga and anime both begin by retelling and expanding its events, making it the seed document of the whole sequel, a status no earlier film holds.

That retelling pattern matters for documentation. The film is the first state of the Boruto story; the manga's opening volumes and the anime's exam arc are adaptations of it with additions and changes, including the deeper Otsutsuki framing added later. The Library orders the Boruto record film first for exactly this reason.

Physically, the film's Japanese release program, its home editions and its Kishimoto design work anchor the modern end of the movie shelf. It is also the last film of the annual tradition: after 2015 the franchise's screen energy moved to the Boruto television series, closing an eleven-film run that began in the Land of Snow.