Road to Ninja: Naruto the Movie

Road to Ninja: Naruto the Movie is set in the Hidden Leaf Village, where Naruto Uzumaki grew up alone after the Nine-Tailed Fox was sealed inside him as a newborn, leaving him without the parents who gave their lives for the village. When the masked figure Tobi puts his plan into motion, Naruto and his teammate Sakura Haruno are cast into a parallel version of their world in which everything is reversed: Naruto's parents are alive, Sakura's are gone, and the people and events they know have changed. Behind this illusion lies a threat to the village and to the world's balance, and the two must decide what the world they want to protect really is before they can confront the masked man.

The film is directed by Hayato Date, whose earlier work includes the 2001 Saiyuki: Requiem and two Naruto anime entries from 2003 and 2011. Yuka Miyata wrote the screenplay, and the voice cast includes Junko Takeuchi as Naruto, Chie Nakamura as Sakura, Toshiyuki Morikawa and Emi Shinohara as Minato and Kushina, Kazuhiko Inoue as Kakashi Hatake and Noriaki Sugiyama as Sasuke Uchiha.

Released in Japan in July 2012, the film runs 109 minutes and took in roughly 18 million dollars worldwide. It holds a 7.6 rating on IMDb from around 9,400 votes and a 7.4 on TMDB from about 1,260 votes, with the two audiences broadly in agreement.