Best Naruto Content in Years
I have watched the new Naruto Mobile Jiraiya animation three times now. The first time I was not sure what hit me. The second time I started taking notes. The third time I just sat with it for a minute after it ended, which is something a ninety-second mobile game promotional video has no business making anyone do.
That reaction is the point. That reaction is also why the Naruto franchise needs to look at this animation very carefully before it decides what comes after Boruto.
Naruto Mobile, developed by Tencent's MoreFun Studios and running for ten years since its 2016 launch, has quietly been producing some of the best Naruto animation content in existence. The cyberpunk Naruto and Sasuke anniversary trailer from December 2025 was already turning heads globally. The Tsunade anniversary animation released in May 2026 was genuinely moving. But this new Jiraiya and Naruto animation, released to celebrate the 10th anniversary milestone and the arrival of commemorative S-Rank versions of Naruto Uzumaki and Jiraiya as playable characters, is the best thing the Naruto brand has put out in years. Maybe longer.
This article breaks down exactly what the animation does, why the blue popsicle scene works the way it does, what the full Naruto and Jiraiya relationship means across the series, and why the rest of the franchise needs to use this specific animation as its creative north star.
You can watch the full Naruto and Jiraiya animation on the official Naruto Mobile YouTube channel and via CBR's coverage of the trailer release.
What Is the New Naruto Mobile Jiraiya Animation?
Naruto Mobile is the long-running mobile game published by Tencent's MoreFun Studios with IP support from Bandai Namco. It has been generating approximately 580 million USD annually and has been one of the most significant ongoing pieces of Naruto content since the main anime concluded. The game regularly produces high-quality animated trailers and character introduction videos that, in several cases, surpass the production quality of official Naruto anime releases in terms of emotional craft and visual direction.
The 10th Anniversary Animation Series
For the game's 10th anniversary, the team has been releasing a series of commemorative animations tied to iconic character relationships. The cyberpunk Naruto-Sasuke animation in December 2025 celebrated their rivalry with a visually spectacular reimagining of their dynamic in a futuristic setting. The Tsunade animation released in May 2026 revisited her emotional collapse after losing Dan Kato and her brother Nawaki, featuring the original Japanese voice cast including Masako Katsuki returning as Tsunade.
What Makes This Jiraiya Animation Different
This new Jiraiya animation follows a different emotional register entirely. It is quieter. More personal. It does not feature dramatic battle sequences or large-scale animation spectacle. It focuses on one relationship, one small moment, and what that moment means for both characters. The animation was released alongside the introduction of Naruto Uzumaki and Jiraiya as commemorative S-Rank ninjas, available to recruit for free during the anniversary event window.
The trailer opens with Jiraiya's most defining line: "A real ninja is one who endures no matter what gets thrown at him." Everything that follows is built around demonstrating why that statement, coming from Jiraiya specifically to Naruto specifically, carries the emotional weight it does.
The Blue Popsicle Scene Explained: Why One Small Moment Carries Everything
The emotional centerpiece of the animation is a scene that longtime Naruto fans will recognize immediately: Jiraiya splitting a blue popsicle in two and giving half to Naruto.
What the Popsicle Scene Actually Represents
On a purely surface level this is nothing. Two people sharing a snack. The animation lingers on it anyway, and the reason it works is because of everything the viewer brings to that image.
Naruto Uzumaki was not simply an orphan who had a hard childhood. He was a child who was actively pushed out of his community. The Hidden Leaf Village knew he carried the Nine-Tails sealed inside him, and many of the adults who knew what that meant responded by treating him like a threat rather than a child. He grew up without parents, without consistent adult guidance, and with the daily experience of being looked at with fear or contempt by people who should have been neighbors and teachers.
Why Jiraiya Was the Most Important Person in Naruto's Life
What Jiraiya represents in Naruto's life is not primarily a trainer or a battle mentor, though he is both of those things. What Jiraiya represents is the first consistently trustworthy adult male presence Naruto had. A man who looked at this chaotic, loud, reckless kid carrying the weight of a village's fear and chose to stay. Chose to teach. Chose to share a popsicle, which is such a small, domestic, ordinary act that it communicates something no battle sequence ever could: I am not going anywhere.
The animation understands this completely. The visual does not need to tell you any of this because it trusts that you already know it. The split popsicle is not explained. It does not need to be. It is presented and held for just long enough that the emotional memory of anyone who watched Naruto grow up alongside this character does the rest of the work.
That is sophisticated visual storytelling. That is also the thing that Boruto, with its massive production infrastructure and direct access to Masashi Kishimoto's world, has consistently failed to replicate.
The Full Naruto and Jiraiya Relationship, From Beginning to End
For newer fans or readers who came to the franchise through Boruto and want to understand why this animation hit the community so hard, here is the full arc of the Naruto and Jiraiya relationship.
How They Met — The Foundation
They first meet when Jiraiya is summoned to help deal with Naruto's dangerous inability to control the Nine-Tails chakra during the Chunin Exams arc. Jiraiya is at this point already established as one of the Legendary Sannin, a title shared by him, Tsunade, and Orochimaru, three ninja whose power defined a generation. He is also Minato Namikaze's teacher, which means he is indirectly Naruto's grandfather figure by training lineage. He does not immediately embrace the teaching relationship. He is dragged into it. But once he commits to Naruto, he commits completely.
Training Arcs and What Jiraiya Taught Naruto
During the original Naruto series, Jiraiya takes Naruto on a two-and-a-half-year training journey after the failure to retrieve Sasuke. This period is almost entirely skipped in the anime, which transitions directly from young Naruto to the beginning of Naruto Shippuden, but it represents the deepest sustained period of Naruto's development as a ninja and as a person. Jiraiya teaches him to control the Nine-Tails chakra. He teaches him the Rasengan, passing down a technique created by Naruto's father Minato. He treats Naruto like a grandson and like a student and like a friend, and he does it without ever making Naruto feel like a burden or an obligation.
Jiraiya's Death and Why It Still Hurts
Jiraiya's death in Naruto Shippuden during the battle with Pain remains one of the most impactful deaths in shōnen manga history. What makes it devastating is not the scale of the battle or the violence of the ending. What makes it devastating is the specific emotional cost. Naruto loses the closest thing to a father figure he ever had. He loses the person who believed in him before Naruto had given anyone a concrete reason to believe. He loses the guy who shared the popsicle.
Naruto Carrying Jiraiya's Legacy in Shippuden and Beyond
The Pain arc that follows Jiraiya's death is widely considered the high point of Naruto Shippuden as a series, and a significant portion of what makes Naruto's emotional state in that arc so powerful is the specific texture of grief that Jiraiya's death created.
For a full breakdown of Jiraiya's most important story moments, the Naruto wiki at Narutopedia is the most comprehensive publicly available resource, and Crunchyroll's editorial coverage has featured multiple retrospectives on Jiraiya's impact on the franchise's legacy.
Why This Animation Quality Is So Exceptional
The Naruto Mobile Jiraiya animation does several things technically that deserve specific attention, because these are the exact things a future Naruto series needs to understand.
What Makes It Different From the Main Anime
First: emotional restraint. The animation does not amplify the blue popsicle moment with swelling orchestral music, dramatic camera movements, or close-up reaction shots that tell you how to feel. It presents the moment simply and trusts the viewer. This restraint is the opposite of how Boruto handles emotional beats, where every significant character moment is scored to maximize the signal that this is important. When you tell the viewer how to feel, you rob them of the experience of actually feeling it.
Second: specificity of choice. Out of every possible Naruto and Jiraiya moment the animators could have chosen as the emotional center of this animation, they chose the blue popsicle. Not the Rasengan training sequence. Not Jiraiya's death. Not the callback moments in the Pain arc where Naruto processes his grief. The popsicle. That choice is specific and deliberate and it communicates a deep understanding of what makes this relationship meaningful. A generic creative team picks the training or the death. A team that actually understands the characters picks the moment that is almost nothing and means everything.
Third: voice direction. Jiraiya's opening line is delivered with the weight of someone who has earned the right to say it. The voice performance does not perform emotion. It carries it.
Fourth: the animation is short. It does not overstay its welcome. It delivers its emotional payload and ends. There is something instructive in that for a franchise that has spent years padding episode counts and stretching arcs past their natural endings.
Naruto Mobile's Best Animations Ranked
The Jiraiya animation is exceptional but it is not an anomaly. Looking at the Naruto Mobile production catalogue:
- Naruto and Jiraiya anniversary animation (May 2026) — the best of the series. Emotional restraint, character specificity, extraordinary.
- Tsunade anniversary animation (May 2026) — deeply cinematic, full original Japanese voice cast, tackles Tsunade's grief in a way the main anime never did. Covered by Screen Rant.
- Cyberpunk Naruto and Sasuke (December 2025) — visually spectacular, went viral globally, represents the franchise's experimental side at its best.
The pattern is consistent. The Naruto Mobile team is producing short-form animated content that is emotionally intelligent, visually distinctive, and creatively ambitious in ways that the main anime franchise has not been for a long time.
What Should the Next Naruto Anime Look Like?
This is the question the new Jiraiya animation raises directly without answering. The framing of "franchise blueprint" is correct but it requires more specificity than most coverage has provided.
The Boruto Problem and What Comes After
The Naruto franchise has conditioned itself to think that bigger is always better. Bigger battles. Bigger power levels. Bigger stakes. Boruto: Naruto Next Generations continued this trajectory and the results were mixed at best. The Jiraiya animation is ninety seconds of two characters sharing a popsicle and it is more affecting than most of what Boruto produced across hundreds of episodes.
Why the Franchise Needs Emotional Restraint Over Spectacle
The next Naruto anime needs to do three specific things that this animation demonstrates:
1. Be willing to be small. The next series needs to trust quiet moments. Intimacy over spectacle. Character over power scaling.
2. Center established emotional relationships. The reason this animation works is because of the accumulated weight of everything that happened between Naruto and Jiraiya across years of storytelling. A new Naruto series does not need to invent new emotional stakes from scratch. It has decades of relationship history to draw from.
3. Animation quality over quantity. The Naruto Mobile team produces a handful of exceptional short-form animations. The main anime produced hundreds of episodes at varying quality levels with significant filler content. If the next Naruto series is going to compete in an era where anime quality standards have been dramatically raised by studios like MAPPA and Ufotable, it cannot afford to prioritize episode volume over animation quality.
What Fans Are Asking For
There is currently no official announcement regarding what comes after Boruto: Two Blue Vortex concludes. Masashi Kishimoto has not publicly committed to additional story content beyond Boruto. But the franchise continues generating significant revenue through games, merchandise, and ongoing animation projects, which makes additional official anime content a matter of when rather than if. You can follow the latest announcements through Crunchyroll News.
Will Jiraiya Return in a Future Naruto Anime?
This is the question the new animation inevitably reignites, and it deserves a direct honest answer rather than the usual fan speculation hedging.
The Canonical Situation
Canonically, Jiraiya is dead. He was killed by Pain during the Naruto Shippuden arc and his body sank to the bottom of the sea. Unlike many significant deaths in the Naruto universe, his has not been walked back. There was no resurrection through the Edo Tensei technique, no clone reveal, no alternate timeline version that showed up in Boruto. In the canonical mainline continuity, Jiraiya is gone.
Kashin Koji — The Closest Thing to a Return
There is a partial exception in Boruto: Two Blue Vortex in the form of Kashin Koji, a character who was created as a clone of Jiraiya by Amado as part of Kara's operations. Kashin Koji shares Jiraiya's DNA and some of his jutsu, and he has appeared in the Boruto narrative in meaningful ways. But he is not Jiraiya. He does not have Jiraiya's memories or emotional history, and the story treats him as a distinct character who happens to share a physical template.
What Fan Theories and What Is Realistic
The only realistic path to Jiraiya's return in an official anime context would be through flashback content, which is what the Naruto Mobile animations effectively are. They are not changing canon. They are revisiting established moments with higher production quality and more emotional specificity. That is probably the most we can expect, and honestly, it may be the most appropriate version of a return. Jiraiya's impact on the franchise is most powerful as memory, as legacy, as the relationship that shaped the Hokage who shaped everything that came after. A canonical resurrection would risk cheapening exactly the grief that makes him matter.
For the latest news on Boruto: Two Blue Vortex and what the franchise is planning beyond it, Viz Media Shonen Jump coverage is the most reliable source for official announcements.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Jiraiya officially back in Naruto?
No. The new Naruto Mobile animation is promotional content for the game's anniversary event, featuring Naruto and Jiraiya as new S-Rank characters. It does not represent a canonical return. Jiraiya remains dead in the main Naruto story.
What is the Naruto Mobile 10th anniversary animation about?
The new Jiraiya animation depicts the relationship between Naruto Uzumaki and Jiraiya, with the blue popsicle scene as its emotional centerpiece. It was released to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Naruto Mobile and the addition of commemorative S-Rank versions of Naruto and Jiraiya as free recruitable characters.
What is the blue popsicle scene in Naruto?
The blue popsicle scene shows Jiraiya splitting a popsicle in two and giving half to Naruto. The moment represents Jiraiya treating Naruto with simple human warmth at a time when most adults in Naruto's life had rejected or feared him. The Naruto Mobile animation uses this scene as its emotional anchor.
Will there be a new Naruto anime after Boruto?
There is no official announcement as of May 2026. Boruto: Two Blue Vortex is still ongoing in manga form and has chapters yet to be animated. Whether Masashi Kishimoto has additional story content planned after Boruto concludes has not been publicly confirmed.
Who voiced Jiraiya in the English dub?
Jiraiya was voiced by David Lodge in the English dub of Naruto and Naruto Shippuden.
Who voiced Jiraiya in the Japanese version?
Jiraiya was voiced by Hiroaki Hirata in the original Japanese version of Naruto and Naruto Shippuden. The Naruto Mobile anniversary animations have continued to feature original Japanese voice cast members.
What is Naruto Mobile and where can I play it?
Naruto Mobile is a mobile game developed by Tencent's MoreFun Studios with Bandai Namco licensing. It has been running since 2016 and is available on iOS and Android. The game regularly produces high-quality animated trailers featuring original voice cast members from the Naruto franchise.
Is Naruto Mobile available outside Japan?
Naruto Mobile has historically had a limited official international release, though many of its animated trailers are publicly available on YouTube through official game channels. The anniversary event trailers can be watched globally regardless of whether the game itself is accessible in your region.