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<div style="color: #dddddd; font-size: 0.82em; letter-spacing: 2px;">CHARACTER · PROTAGONIST</div>
<div style="color: #ffffff; font-weight: bold; font-size: 1.4em; margin: 3px 0 1px 0;">Naruto Uzumaki</div>
<div style="color: #EC7124; font-size: 0.92em;">うずまきナルト · <i>Uzumaki Naruto</i></div>
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| colspan="2" style="background: #111; text-align: center; padding: 0;" | ![[naruto_uzumaki.webp|alt=Naruto Uzumaki grinning, wearing his orange jumpsuit and goggles]]
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| colspan="2" style="background: #111; text-align: center; padding: 2px 0 6px 0; border-bottom: 2px solid #EC7124;" | <div style="color: #999999; font-size: 0.82em;">Naruto at the start of the series</div>
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| colspan="2" | {{Collapse|text="'''[ Details ▾ ]'''"|color="#EC7124"|style="width:100%;"}}
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! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #EC7124; text-align: center; width: 36%;" | Debut
| Manga: chapter 1, "Uzumaki Naruto!!"<ref name="ch1">''Naruto'', chapter 1: "Uzumaki Naruto!!" (Shueisha, ''Weekly Shōnen Jump'', 1999).</ref><br>Anime: episode 1, "Enter: Naruto Uzumaki!"<ref name="ep1site">"Enter: Naruto Uzumaki." ''NARUTO OFFICIAL SITE'' (official). [https://naruto-official.com/en/anime/naruto1/list/01_225 naruto-official.com/en/anime/naruto1/list/01_225]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref>
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! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #EC7124; text-align: center;" | Voice actors
| Junko Takeuchi (Japanese)<ref name="jpcast">''Naruto'', episode 1 on-screen cast credits (Studio Pierrot / TV Tokyo, 2002).</ref><br>Maile Flanagan (English)<ref name="encast">''Naruto'', episode 1: "Enter: Naruto Uzumaki!" English-language broadcast credits (VIZ Media, 2005).</ref>
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! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #EC7124; text-align: center;" | Affiliation
| [[Naruto/Village Hidden in the Leaves|Village Hidden in the Leaves]]
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! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #EC7124; text-align: center;" | Status
| Academy student; graduates in chapter 1<ref name="ch1" />
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! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #EC7124; text-align: center;" | Signature technique
| [[Naruto/Shadow Clone Technique|Shadow Clone Technique]]
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'''Naruto Uzumaki''' (うずまきナルト, ''Uzumaki Naruto'') is the title character and protagonist of ''[[Naruto]]''. A twelve-year-old orphan of the [[Naruto/Village Hidden in the Leaves|Village Hidden in the Leaves]], he is the loudest boy in the Ninja Academy, its worst student, its most inventive prankster, and the self-proclaimed future Hokage — and, as the first chapter reveals, the unknowing host of the [[Naruto/Nine-Tails|Nine-Tails]], the fox spirit that nearly destroyed the village on the night he was born.<ref name="ch1" /> He opens the series by failing his graduation exam and closes the same chapter as a ninja with a forbidden signature technique and, at last, one person who believes in him.

== Chapter 1: the boy behind the pranks ==

The series introduces Naruto mid-crime: he has painted graffiti across the giant stone faces of the Hokage Monument, to the fury of the whole village and the weary exasperation of his Academy instructor, [[Naruto/Iruka Umino|Iruka Umino]]. Hauled back to class, he embarrasses Iruka with his one original invention — the "Sexy Technique", a transformation into a naked young woman — and the next day fails the graduation exam because it tests the one skill he simply cannot do, the basic [[Naruto/Clone Technique|Clone Technique]].<ref name="ch1" />

What sets the story in motion is how alone he is in that failure. Sitting on the swing outside the Academy, watching parents congratulate every child but him, Naruto overhears the adults' whispers — and their unfinished sentences about what he *is*. The assistant instructor [[Naruto/Mizuki|Mizuki]] exploits that loneliness, steering him into stealing the [[Naruto/Scroll of Sealing|Scroll of Sealing]] as a fake "makeup exam". The night ends with Mizuki telling Naruto the village's forbidden secret, Iruka taking a weapon meant for the boy, and Naruto — defending the first adult who ever treated him like a person — unleashing the [[Naruto/Shadow Clone Technique|Multi Shadow Clone Technique]] he taught himself hours earlier. Iruka ties his own forehead protector on Naruto and declares him a graduate.<ref name="ch1" />

== Personality ==

Naruto's defining traits are all visible within pages of his debut: he is loud, impulsive, starved for attention, and incapable of giving up. The pranks are not malice but strategy — being scolded is the only acknowledgment the village has ever given him. He says it himself over ramen at Ichiraku, in the chapter's quietest scene: he wants the Hokage's title so that the whole village will have to stop disrespecting him and finally look at him.<ref name="ch1" /> That hunger to be acknowledged, and the stubbornness that keeps him training alone in the woods until his clones finally work, are the engine of the entire series.

== Abilities ==

On paper, Naruto graduates at the bottom of his class: his basics are sloppy and the standard Clone Technique defeats him completely. In practice, chapter 1 already shows why the paper is wrong. He carries chakra reserves out of all proportion to his age — a consequence of the fox sealed inside him — which is exactly why a precise, small-scale technique fails him while a forbidden, chakra-devouring one comes almost naturally.<ref name="ch1" /> The [[Naruto/Shadow Clone Technique|Shadow Clone Technique]], mastered in a single desperate night, becomes his trademark from that point on, and his knack for surprise — no one expects the dead-last to fill a forest with hundreds of himself — stays with him for the whole story.

== The fox in the seal ==

Twelve years before the story begins, the Nine-Tailed Fox attacked the Village Hidden in the Leaves; it was stopped only when the Fourth Hokage sealed it into a newborn child at the cost of his own life. The village's adults were forbidden by law from ever speaking of it — a law meant to protect Naruto, which instead left him unable to understand why every adult in the village looks at him with cold eyes, and why their children learned to do the same.<ref name="ch1" /> Naruto himself learns the truth only when Mizuki weaponizes it against him. What the fox means for his body, his heart, and his future is a question the series unfolds slowly, over hundreds of chapters — for a new reader it is enough to know that the loneliest boy in the village has been carrying its greatest burden without knowing it.

== Relationships ==

The pivotal bond of chapter 1 is with [[Naruto/Iruka Umino|Iruka Umino]], the strict instructor who fails him honestly, treats him to ramen, and then risks his life for him — the first person Naruto ever hears say, plainly, that he is not the fox but a proud ninja of the Hidden Leaf.<ref name="ch1" /> The Third Hokage watches over Naruto from a distance, and [[Naruto/Mizuki|Mizuki]] serves as his first true enemy. His classmates — among them [[Naruto/Sasuke Uchiha|Sasuke Uchiha]] and [[Naruto/Sakura Haruno|Sakura Haruno]] — are barely glimpsed so far, but they are about to become the most important people in his life.

== A very long road ==

Naruto states his dream in the first chapter and the series spends its remaining seven hundred chapters testing it. Without giving anything away: the boy on the swing does not stay on the swing, the technique he learned from a stolen scroll follows him into every battle he ever fights, and whether the village comes to acknowledge him is the story the manga takes fifteen years to tell.

== See also ==

* [[Naruto/Iruka Umino|Iruka Umino]]
* [[Naruto/Shadow Clone Technique|Shadow Clone Technique]]
* [[Naruto/Clone Technique|Clone Technique]]
* [[Naruto/Nine-Tails|Nine-Tails]]
* [[Naruto/Village Hidden in the Leaves|Village Hidden in the Leaves]]
* [[Naruto]]