Masashi Kishimoto
For the ninth "Naruto" film, "", Kishimoto was responsible for both the story planning and characters' designs. To promote the film, Kishimoto worked in "Motion Comic Naruto" a DVD that shows scenes from the manga in 3D that was given to the first 1.5 million people who went to the cinema. Regarding "Naruto"s publication Kishimoto told Tetsuya Nishio in July 2012 that the series would take over a year and a half to end. However, Kishimoto admitted that it now appears that the manga will continue beyond that timeframe. In April 2012, it was announced that Kishimoto would publish a one-shot version of his long-postponed mafia manga, "Mario", in "Jump Square", based on the rough, 160-page manuscript he began working on before "Naruto" became serialized.
Naruto
Christopher A. Born notes that the "Naruto" storyline contains traditional Confucian values, and suggests that students who analyse manga such as "Naruto" and "Bleach" will learn more about Confucianism than they would from studying its abstract ideas. Norman Melchor Robles Jr. evaluated the portrayal of both positive and negative ideas in "Naruto" by counting words in the script which were associated with either violence or positive values; he found that a small majority of tagged words were violent, but commented that the portrayal of violence seemed organized to show how positive strategies on the part of the protagonists could overcome the violence. Sheuo Hui Gan considers the series to have a set of "traditional ethical values." She also compares the treatment of alienation in "Naruto", which Naruto overcomes by joining his society, to the portrayal of alienation in "Akira" and "Neon Genesis Evangelion", where the main characters remain alienated.