Masashi Kishimoto
Following the conclusion of "Naruto", Kishimoto became involved in the "Start of a New Era Project" commemorating the manga's conclusion and 15th anniversary. On the last page of the final chapter, "Weekly Shonen Jump" announced that a spin-off miniseries, also authored by Kishimoto, would be released in 2015. The series, "", ran from April to July 2015. Beyond this, Kishimoto was also heavily involved with two canonical movies, "" and "", as he personally supervised both movies, and illustrated several light novels. When asked by Boruto Uzumaki's voice actress Yūko Sanpei to continue making "Naruto" movies, Kishimoto stated that he was taking a break and could not physically do so.
Boruto: Naruto the Movie
The script was initially completed around the end of January 2014 and was finalised a month later after a few corrections. Even though Kishimoto had worked before on "" (2012) and "The Last" (2014), this time he encountered various problems because of his greater involvement with "Boruto" — specifically writing the script. To prepare for "Boruto", Kishimoto said that he had read a book about the process of creating screenplays. He added that in "Boruto" he paid tribute to several movies, the most notable being the 1996 film "The Rock" and the 2002 film "Spider-Man". The tribute to "The Rock" was mostly done by using "Kishōtenketsu", which is a common way of structuring stories in Japan. Kishimoto developed Boruto and Naruto's relationship based on his relationship with his own sons. Yamashita said some scenes had to be removed from the film because of the short time the team had to develop "Boruto". Yamashita's favorite scene was Sasuke's fight against Kinshiki. The initial scene was also revised multiple times to reduce its length. Yamashita said they had to remove scenes that featured Shikadai and other characters from the film. He also added that the film's success was mostly due to many of Kishimoto's ideas which the staff liked.