Hokori Otaku 
Introduction
When it comes to the Boruto anime, from the start there was a lot of hype and a good amount of talent that came from Naruto Shippuden, which in turn set a bar for Boruto that was hard for them to maintain, and it shows later in the series.
For reference, Boruto: Naruto the Movie came first, and then the manga was announced, followed by the anime. The manga was originally published in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, which meant that at the start, it was released on a weekly basis.
Kishimoto-sensei did not want to work on Boruto after years of working on Naruto, but he suggested his longtime assistant Mikio Ikemoto to work on it alongside Ukyo Kodachi, who worked with Kishimoto-sensei on the screenplay for Boruto the Movie. Kodachi was then tasked with writing the story for the Boruto manga, which was outlined by Kishimoto-sensei. Kodachi built on that for a while until Kishimoto-sensei took over.
According to Google, Kodachi was involved in 216 out of 293 episodes of the Boruto anime, which might be wrong, but I’m guessing it was mostly a guiding role.
Regarding the anime, Boruto: Naruto the Next Generations, the show (building upon the movie and novels) was going strong under the direction of Naruto veteran Hiroyuki Yamashita. Through his industry connections, he brought some of the best upcoming animators to Boruto, which is still visible today. However, that lasted only until episode 65, after which he stepped away to work on other projects. He was replaced by Toshiro Fuji and then by the long-time director Masayuki Koda, who was there until the end of Part 1.
Throughout this, the character designs were done by Tetsuya Nishio and Hirofumi Suzuki (who are credited as the lead character designers for the anime). There are also Ichiro Uno and Toshiyuki Tsuru who are credited as “Sub Character Designer” (basically, they create the designs for filler and some on-the-go characters, at least for Boruto).
Going into Nishio’s history, when the Naruto anime was announced, Kishimoto’s condition was for Tetsuya Nishio to be the character designer. He loved Nishio’s work and felt he could do justice to his original work in the anime adaptation’s character designs, and since then, Nishio has been attached to this franchise.
Animators love his character designs because of their simplification from the manga versions, which makes them easy for animators to work with. And that is also the curse he bears. Manga readers complain a lot about how in the anime their favorite characters’ clothes or hair were changed. Personally, I feel like this is wrong because the conditions in anime are so different from drawing a manga. For a consistent look, I feel like they take some liberty here, and for Nishio, it’s not always that big of a distance from the manga to the anime.
Boruto Issues
When it comes to the Boruto anime, there were lots of things that went wrong, but according to netizens, it’s all Nishio’s fault. There are long Reddit threads about how he ruined their favorite characters or how, because of his designs, the animators had a tough time working with storyboards.
The Boruto anime has a lot of inconsistency when it comes to art style. Over the 293 episodes, a lot of animators worked on it, and with that came their individual art styles. For example, an episode by Ichiro Uno would look different from a few minutes’ cut by Chengxi Huang, or when Hiroyuki Yamashita came, Naruto looked different because of his drawings, or Park Myoung-hun’s cuts are so visible.
But these are high-priority episodes. When there are weekly fillers or “anime canon” episodes which are outsourced most of the time, the animation quality gets so different from what might have come out two weeks ago. But that has nothing to do with the character designs; it’s about the time and the quality of the drawings.
So, for example, Park Myoung-hun, who was a constant contributor but from an outsourced studio, can do an amazing job with the same character designs from Nishio. But when given so little time, even he can mess up the anatomy of characters.
Production Issues
I have read enough from animators about the weekly production of Boruto, and it was a total mess. Episodes were finished a few hours before airing, there were complete redraws of cuts, and they were paying extra just to get enough content for an episode. There was so much more. And it broke the production line for Boruto.
Now, why did this happen? There is no particular answer, but as I said earlier, the Boruto anime from the start had all the issues you can think about with a weekly anime.
The best example of this mess comes from that one frame of Boruto crying, which was supposed to be one of the saddest sequences of the whole arc, since one of the important characters died, but it became a joke. The animator of that particular sequence had just come out of an accident with a swollen wrist and more. He was going through physical therapy while he was given that cut to draw in an emergency in just a couple of hours, and in that situation, they just worked with whatever was there, and it became what we saw. That’s the mess it was all about.
A Perception
Now in all this, a perception was built that it was all because of the character designs that were simplified by Nishio, and that animators were having a hard time working with them. Which is not the truth because for Boruto, it wasn’t about the character designs but rather more about the scheduling, which was the biggest villain of the Boruto anime.
There were some episodes where Ichiro Uno was handling everything in production, and he used his character designs. With enough time and proper timing, there were some amazing episodes from him, and that fueled this hate for Nishio more. I’m not saying it’s Ichiro Uno’s fault, but his episodes took months in production, while the filler episodes took weeks to finish.
Filler Hell
One of the biggest reasons people don’t watch Boruto is the amount of fillers it has. Now, that is something I again think comes from the studio’s decision to want Boruto to be a weekly show, which hurt them a lot. So when Kishimoto gave Boruto to Ikemoto, one of the conditions was a monthly schedule.
At first, the Boruto manga was published in Weekly Shonen Jump and then moved to V Jump with a monthly release and an average of 40 pages per chapter. Considering the weekly schedule for the anime, that’s too little material to be adapted, and this is one aspect of Boruto that hurt the anime more. With less material, the studio started adapting all the Boruto and Naruto novels into the anime and then moved to completely anime-only stories.
Having fillers meant stories and characters that were meaningless to the main story, and that’s something that good animators didn’t want to work with. This was said in many interviews by animators, that they did not want to work on characters who would be forgotten in a few weeks or even get attached to “filler” episodes. In the end, the Boruto anime became a playground or learning ground for animators to practice and hone their skills, but that didn’t mean the staff didn’t work hard; the opposite was true.
Anime Canon
This is something I might have seen just with Boruto; this is a bit complicated for someone new to understand. For example, Sumire, who is a prominent character in the story, was introduced in the anime with a full-fledged story, but she was then introduced in manga chapter 18 in the state she was left in the anime. So, the manga does address anime events but doesn’t get into them much. Another example is Metal Lee (Rock Lee’s son, with no mother ever shown). He is part of Team 5 now; this team is not shown in the manga, but they do exist since other characters address them.
If you look at it at first, you’ll get confused, and that’s how it is with Boruto. The whole anime, while considering filler, can be considered canon, since you never know when a filler arc is referenced, and suddenly that arc is canon now. This is something that’s been pushed too much on the internet, and it made non-viewers build up a perception that it’s all a bad thing. But actually, for a monthly manga, I personally love it, since Ikemoto can focus on the main story while anime writers can get into the depth of some particular characters or other stories that Ikemoto could not address, since he also has limitations on what he could address in the manga.
Kaiju No. 8
Coming back to Nishio, there is no reason for him to get the level of hate he is getting. I mean, he has shown what he is worth. The whole Naruto anime is an example, and the most recent is the Kaiju No. 8 anime. He was the main character designer of it, and while there were initial complaints about the anime (again, because he was attached to it), as a manga reader, I would say the anime characters look really great!
And again, there might have been some changes, but that’s needed, of course, since drawing one panel of a character is different from making that same panel move with multiple frames. Animating is a tough job.
Conclusion
Somehow, a post about Tetsuya Nishio ended up addressing Boruto’s anime production. I tried my best to fact-check everything, but if I am wrong anywhere in this whole post, I’m sorry. I’ll try my best next time. And also, this might have become one of my most dense posts to date, so I appreciate you from my heart! Thank you.