Who is Masashi Kishimoto?

Masashi Kishimoto was born on 8th November 1975 in the Okayama prefecture. His home was close to Hiroshima and his grandfather often told him stories about wars and the grudges that arose from them. He felt grateful that the previous generations were able to end the war.

During his elementary school days, Kishimoto watched Dragon Ball Z and Kinnikuman with his twin brother. In the coming years, Kishimoto started idolizing the creator of Dragon Ball Z, Akira Toriyama.

With the help of his friend, Kishimoto could follow the series as he did not have enough to purchase the Weekly Shonen Jump where Dragon Ball manga got published. He even showed interest in drawing the characters from whichever anime shows he saw.

In High school, Kishimoto started losing interest in anime and Manga Aziz had started pursuing the sports baseball and basketball. However, when he saw the poster for the animated film Akira became fascinated with how it was illustrated and he wish to learn the creator’s art style

During his final year of University Kishimoto spent most of his time drawing manga. He decided to go to an art college with the hope so becoming a mangaka (manga artist)

When he entered college, Kishimoto decided that he should try creating a manga series of a genre that had not been published in the weekly show in the jump.

In his second year of college, Kishimoto started drawing manga for a magazine contest. He then noticed that his work was quite similar to the seinen genre which targeted the adult audience rather than the children and teenagers who read Shonen Jump. He then realized that his style was not suitable for the magazine.

When Kishimoto saw the anime series Hashire Melos he was fascinated by the character design that we made by the animators and he started researching various work from animators. He, later on, met Tetsuya Nishio, a designer for an anime who was a big influence at that point. After drawing and getting inspired by multiple character designs from various anime series Kishimoto’s style finally started resembling that of a shonen series.