Ugh, I just heard and saw opening 10 of Naruto shippuuden and I'm pretty sure that it's dying. The manga may be strong but the anime is falling fast. The animation is getting worse and cheaper and the fillers are getting longer and worse. <_<
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0o-Mf2S1Ds that's the song. Honestly, it makes me gag, it sounds like some lame japanese country from the 90s or something, anyway I think it's terrible. Bleach's new song is Harukaze by scandal so I expect that to be one I'll want to do on piano. But this it just, ((shutters... )) I'm getting tired of these anime companies going cheap on the animation. Some less popular anime's animation is so good, but naruto's went down the toilet and to make it worse they've started adding lame scenes that are fillers to MANGA episodes! Why? Alot of japanese take good effort for their products and shows but the anime company for naruto just doesn't care anymore, All I can do is shake me head... Bleach is going strong even with opening 14 but the naruto anime is dying.

^Ugh. I agree with you. The manga is right on track with the plot, but the anime is just LOADED with fillers. That's why I've stopped watching and reading Naruto a LONG time ago. >.>

Not too surprised, Naruto never struck me as anything but run-of-the-mill action shonen....

What? The animation in that opening was pretty good. Better than the average anime, at least. I didn't hear anything wrong with the song, either...

The animation was really clean and crisp, sure, but it cut a lot of corners by using repeat frames and it was just glaringly obvious. If people are going to use computers to do all their animations, they could at least spend time making more unique frames with all the time that is saved...

What??? Again, I'm not seeing that problem. Nothing ever looped for more than around a second, except when they danced and such, when the looping actually looked good. Again, much less looping going on than the average anime, and much better quality...I know you're at least a casual anime fan, RD, so you should know there's nothing especially grievous going on with this opening, hahah. You're also in art school, so you should know how ridiculously expensive traditional 2D animation is (which is why American companies only make garbage CG stuff now, I imagine). And how much time are computers saving traditional animatiors, exactly? Everything is still drawn by hand and scanned in. The only thing that's really made quicker is the painting and inking...which isn't much compared to actually drawing all the frames, but even then, animation quality keeps on rising higher and higher...

Note that I'm not a fan of Naruto (or most shounen stuff in general) because of the obscene lack of story and ridiculous amount of filler involved, but if Naruto were to come out today with this opening, I'd definitely check it out. It's better made than most openings I see, hahah.

Edit: And look at opening 9, that kentaku apparently had no problem with! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCIlmLEH0wE&feature=related
It's 90% stills, and the animation that's there isn't very impressive. I imagine both openings cost about the same to make, but op 9 spent the money on cheesy cg effects, where op 10 spent the money on comedic, well-done animation. The gap between what's impressive and what impresses people constantly worries me as an artist. = \