Wake up and smell the ramen, you anime lovers, it’s that time of the year, Anime Pasadena is back with another star-studded celebration with all things anime, manga, and the cosplay communities. And with such a community comes great entertainment, mouth-watering merchandise and late-night dance parties for all ages to enjoy. Grab a kunai and meet up with your favorite senpai, because it’s time to see who will be the next Hokage.
The Cast Panel
Each member of the voice acting trade has committed rigorous training to bring to you their own unique fighting style of voice acting in order to mesmerize their audience by bringing the characters they voice to life. Come along and summon Excitement-no-Jutsu as we cover the latest of the Naruto Questions and Answers English Dub voice actor cast panel.
For this panel, we had Yuri Lowenthal (Sasuke Uchiha), Kate Higgins (Sakura Haruno), Tara Platt (Temari), Doug Erholtz (Asuma Sarutobi and Kankuro), Dave Wittenberg (Kakashi Hatake and Gamakichi) and Cherami Leigh (Sarada Uchiha).
There have been some hard-hitting questions in this year’s Anime Pasadena panels, but no one was truly expecting to get stumped on just the concept of the question itself. Our moderator asked, “What’s your hot take? I want to hear the wildest or craziest thing that you think about your character or another character on the show.” And all of them combined were caught, not by the question, but by the meaning of the phrase “hot take”. Tara did her best to explain with her own take, which is actually quite accurate.
“Sakura has bad taste in men.”
A fan comes up with the question, “Which Naruto villain do you think was right?”. Dave makes an excellent point that all villains in Naruto are essentially broken heroes except for two: Danzo and Madara. Another asks, “There’s a lot of potential differences in the characters between the manga and the anime, what aspect in a character that Kishimoto could’ve utilized better?” Dave responded with the huge difference with Sakura that her portrayal in the manga was much better being a “badass superhero” rather than in the anime being portrayed as this “boy crazy lunatic”.
Naruto, Naruto Shippuden and Boruto are currently available to stream on platforms such as Crunchyroll, Peacock and Adult Swim. Studio Pierrot announced that a limited new series of Naruto is set to premiere in 2025, though an official release date has yet to be mentioned. Manga such as Naruto, Boruto and Boruto: Two Blue Vortex are available on VIZ Media.
My hot take on that panel was: Jiraiya could’ve been revived at the 4th Great Ninja War then following up with what Reincarnated Ninja would their characters should potentially fight in the 4th Great Ninja War? Understanding that Cherami won’t answer because her character wasn’t in that part of Shippūden so everyone’s answers are great.