What Is the Road of Naruto Anniversary Project?

The PV was released on the franchise's official channels as the centerpiece of the anime's 20th anniversary year, which began from the original series' October 2002 premiere. Scene selection is the document's interest: the Wave bridge, the Chunin Exams, the Valley of the End, Jiraiya, Pain, the war and the final duel, re-drawn by current Pierrot staff in the designs of each era. It functions as the studio's own canon of what the anime means, and it was viewed tens of millions of times within its first period online.

The anniversary program around it included a Naruto gallery and music events in Japan, a worldwide character poll whose winner earned a Kishimoto one-shot, and the announcement of four brand-new Naruto episodes, newly animated stories set in the original series' era, scheduled for September 2023. Those episodes were postponed shortly before broadcast for quality reasons, with a Boruto rerun selection airing in their slot, and the project has been awaited since.

The postponement is part of the record and the Library states it plainly: as of this documentation, the four episodes remain announced and delayed rather than released, and any listing or article presenting them as aired is wrong. Anniversary projects of this scale commonly slip; the PV, by contrast, is complete and is the anniversary's delivered artifact.

For collectors, Road of Naruto produced the anniversary year's physical trail: exhibition goods, the poll's magazine one-shot, and anniversary-branded home video in Japan. The montage itself is digital-only, but it is already the standard visual summary of the anime era, the clip every later retrospective will borrow from.