To protect children and young people from violence and pornography, many countries have passed laws that censor anime. But in addition to the respective country, the localization team also has the opportunity to make cuts and changes to the original material. We show you five changes in Naruto that caused more confusion than help.
Which examples are shown here? Naruto is one of the animes where cutting scissors were used most frequently on RTLZWEI. The German TV version of Naruto not only caused more confusion than it helped for many editors in the MeinMMO editorial team, but also for many fans. The version that ran in the afternoon program on RTLZWEI had numerous cuts and changes, some of which changed the overall context.
MeinMMO has picked out a few examples for you in which the changes in the anime were incomprehensible to us. We have not listed any examples here in which, for example, blood, bare skin or sexual practices were censored because they are intended to protect minors.
Zabusa threatens with a sword hilt
Zabusa is an opponent that Naruto faces right at the beginning of the anime. In order to defuse the gun violence, RTLZWEI decided to cut some animations with Zabusa’s gigantic sword. So far so good.
But in some shots we still get to see Zabusa’s sword – or at least what’s left of it. So he threatens another character with his sword handle, from the end of which the blade has been removed.
You can see the sword stub in the following YT video from Mr X:
The scene didn’t seem very threatening to me when I was a child and I wondered why the character should be afraid of a sword stub.
A chance lip touch or romantic kiss?
In episode 3 of Naruto there is a kiss between Naruto and Sasuke. This is just a mistake because one of the students pushes the kneeling Naruto from behind. This causes him to fall forward and land his lips on Sasuke’s mouth.
There was nothing like that to be seen in Germany – the girls watching were surprised about something, but we never found out why. We don’t really see what was so bad about Naruto and Sasuke’s kissing mishap that it had to be cut out.
The kiss is not at all romantic or erotic in nature, but rather a funny coincidence. Viewers of the RTLZWEI version never found out what the group of girls in the ninja academy were so amazed about.
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