Naruto Just Made Time Traveling Canon with Boruto

Naruto fans love to come up with original content for the series, but they never expect to see it become canon. Even the franchise itself has come up with outlandish plot tools in its films, but they are rarely if ever embraced in the canon. To date, only a couple films have been fed into the canon, but it seems like one movie element is ready to make its way to the actual anime.

Recently, Boruto: Naruto Next Generations set up a new arc, and it was set up with the anime's most recent episode. Fans got to watch Sasuke and Boruto track down a very sneaky Urashiki as he tried to defeat Naruto, but the villain has a rather roundabout plan to take out the Hokage. You know how the saying goes, if you can't beat them, then you steal a secret ancient artifact that lets you travel back in time to beat your target when they're just a kid.

Yup, that's totally how it goes... right?

All jokes aside, Naruto has finally introduced time travel to the main canon without any weird parallel universes being tampered with. In the films, Road to Ninja: Naruto the Movie saw its hero transported to an alternate universe by Tobi. In fact, a good few people have been sent to various dimensions in Naruto thanks to the gnarly Sharingan.

Of course, some time travel has actually gone down in the films, and you only have to look at The Lost Tower to see an example. Naruto is sent twenty years into the past where he meets his father, and it seems the main anime has found a way to rope in the plot device at last.

All thanks to Urashiki, an ancient device in the Naruto Universe has been found which can allow its user to travel back in time. The Karasuki is the artifact responsible for the adventure, and it seems to be the only way for Sasuke and Boruto to return. And if all goes well, the pair will take out Urashiki before he can even dream stealing the Nine-Tails from a genin Naruto.

Are you interested to see how this time-travel plot works out? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @MeganPetersCB to talk all things comics and anime!

Originally created by Masashi Kishimoto for Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump in 1999, Naruto follows a young ninja, with a sealed demon within him, that wishes to become the leader of his home village. The series ran for 700 chapters overall, and was adapted into an anime series by Studio Pierrot and Aniplex that ran from 2002 to 2017. The series was popular enough to warrant a sequel, Boruto: Naruto Next Generations which is set several years after the events of the original Naruto story and features the children of many of its key characters such as Naruto and Hinata.