Naruto: The corrosive effects of child abuse.
Naruto is, like many anime, based on a popular Japanese manga. It currently airs on Cartoon Network, marketed to children, rather than its late-night big brother Adult Swim.
Unlike any of its American counterparts—the utterly noxious cultural misconception Xiaolin Showdown chief among its thematic rivals—the subtext beneath Naruto’s glossily animated surface and big, expressive eyes is a story about the corrosive effects of child abuse.
This is a show about the abused, about how the traumas visited upon us in childhood build our worlds in bruises and blood.
Our protagonist is Naruto, an orphan, a blonde boy with more energy than self-control. He is a social outcast, growing up alone and despised, and he desires more than anything the respect of his fellow villagers. His goal is to become hokage, the most exalted ninja of the clan, the leader of a culture of warriors.
There is Sasuke, the last surviving member of the Uchiha clan, a self-proclaimed "avenger." The talent in his bloodline is the sharingan, an ability that lets him learn and mimic any other ninja’s learned abilities merely by witnessing it once. He is often proclaimed the strongest, the fastest, the best of the new class of ninja by his teachers, and he is something of a romantic idol for the girls in the school.
This is the primary dichotomy of the series: the outcast and the favorite, the reject and the popular kid. The fire inside Sasuke is the desire to mete out vengeance on those who have wronged him, those who have deprived him of his parents. This is his goal, and the entirety of his experience at school is secondary to becoming strong enough to kill his enemies.
The mystery of Naruto’s orphaning explains the odd facial marks he wears: three equal length lines radiating out in 45-degree increments on his cheeks, what I first mistook to be tattoos of cat whiskers or scars. They are the only external evidence of Naruto’s birth: The Village Hidden in the Leaves was terrorized by the Nine-Tailed Fox, a demon made of fire that destroyed and consumed. The ninja lords that rule the village have sealed the demon inside Naruto, a foundling, and it seems as if this is the source of his boundless energy and the irrepressible mischief he is compelled to get himself into.
The idea of a school of warrior children, of lethal boys and girls training against each other in a struggle to out-kill and outlast, performs a striking allegorical function as we learn the background of each student. Almost without fail, these children have been attacked, tormented, beaten, traumatized, victimized, or made to sacrifice without compensation or consent. Naruto holds the demon inside of him, is watched by the ninja elders for any sign that the demon will break free—and at the first hint of recklessness they will kill him. Sasuke lives to assimilate the power and the means of destruction, driven to relive the circumstances of his raising.
Even the side characters we might easily forget bear the scars of early abuse. There is Shino, son of a clan of "beastmasters," who in a spectacularly gruesome fight, defeats his opponent with a flood of parasitic beetles that live inside him. The birthright of the clans is a blood pact with these beetles: the child is infected with a colony, and in return for letting these insects feast off his or her spiritual energy, he can command them in battle. But the host has no say in whether or not the infection takes place; and it is a crapshoot whether the host may even survive the initial infection.
Shino’s opponent, Zaku, lived on the streets as a beggar and a thief. In a flashback we see him ruthlessly beaten for stealing a loaf of bread, his arms battered and broken, and in a particularly cruel turn of the narrative, an enraged Sasuke twists Zaku’s arms behind his back and snaps them in half with a mad cackle. The acquisition of power is inadequate to prevent Zaku from being abused again, and the lesson is clear: only the strongest can prevent themselves from becoming victims.
All these children have traumatic pasts, and they wind up enrolled in a school that trains them to harness violence and use it in controlled bursts. They are institutionalized in such a way that their self-worth is tied to recreating the circumstances of their abuse, only—and this is key—with themselves as the abusers.
It is because of this utterly perverse incarnation of the bildungsroman that I suggest the point of Naruto is not escapism or entertainment: it is the literalization of the cycle of abuse. These children are abused, and because the abuse shapes their formative years, because the abuse is in a very real sense their only socialization, they grow up knowing only violence and fighting. Childhood abuse has configured their mental landscapes so that their only outlook is on the world as a war, as a continuing struggle between potential abusers and potential victims.
A fighting school for beaten children is possibly the most apt and the most agonizing description of the potential fate of abused children that I can think of.
How odd we market this toward children ourselves...