It’s no secret that anime like Naruto, One Piece, or Bleach will contain tons of filler. For those who don’t know, a filler episode is just a random episode in a series that does not progress the main story. But when YouTuber Oceaniz decided to take on the task of removing 115 hours of filler from the shonen jump anime Naruto for his girlfriend, you know that that’s some dedication.
Oceaniz released a video talking about how he wanted to get people into Naruto. The problem is that this anime has tons of filler as the anime was coming out alongside the manga and needed to stall for time. He also pointed out how some scenes get repeated and only a few episodes showed any new information.
“As the anime was coming out alongside the manga, it employed every trick in the book to stall for time to avoid catching up. Entire seasons of filler, 10-minute long flashbacks, literal hundreds of reaction shots. You name it, Naruto did it. The flashbacks in particular are so bad that certain scenes are shown up to, no joke, 20 different times, with only a fraction of them showing any new information”.
As a result the YouTuber decided to create a custom Naruto series tailored to his liking that removed unnecessary scenes so it’s more accessible to watch for someone (like his girlfriend) who is just joining in.
The “Ocean Cut” is an Oceaniz supercut of the English dub of Naruto (sorry sub fans). The cut contains multiple TV episodes turned into 50-to 120-minute episodes. The opening titles were played once and music and voice-overs were edited so it wasn’t jarring. Filler episodes were turned into specials if the viewer wants to watch them on their own time. And only one major change was made from the entire story.
Oceaniz had to make hard decisions about whether a scene stayed or not, but was careful to retain all-important character moments. Oceaniz explained his entire thought process for each season of Naruto in his 30-minute video which you can watch above.
“You will noticed that as I go on, there will be a lot of choices to make like this where I have to weigh against ‘is it worth deleting this and saving a little time?’ or ‘is this scene actually too important for that?'”
The cut reduced 115 hours of unnecessary filler, making it possible to watch the entire Naruto series in just 5 days and 12 hours rather than the original 10. The YouTuber showed it to his friends and has received positive results, before screening it to his girlfriend. His girlfriend commented on his cut as “one of the best shows you’ve shown me so far”.
When asked by Kotaku if a Boruto Ocean cut is going to be made, he rejected the idea as he was not familiar with the story.
“Boruto Ocean Cut is NOT happening because a) I don’t particularly like Boruto and b) since the difference between the Boruto anime and Boruto manga are so big, bigger than [Naruto’s] were, it would be an enormous task for a series I don’t know nearly as well as Naruto.”
Naruto is a martial arts shonen manga that was released back in 1999 and finished its publication run in Nov 2014. The manga was later adapted into a two-part anime series from 2002 to 2017 and had numerous theatrical releases. In 2016, a spin-off manga series titled Boruto: Naruto Next Generations was released and was later adapted into anime in 2017.