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The most obvious answer everyone over the Internet is giving to this question
is "Because anime is produced much faster compared to manga, they need to put
in fillers in order to slow down the anime series". However, that shouldn't be
the only reason.

For example, consider One Piece. The show is going on for more than 500
episodes, and less than 10% are fillers. Comparing that to Naruto, the show
has almost the same number of episodes (original and Shippuuden combined), but
almost 50% of its episodes are fillers. Needless to say, the manga of Naruto
is so far ahead that the anime won't be able to catch up even if they produce
100+ episodes without any fillers.


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2012-12-13T15:56:49.523
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anime-production
Why are there so many fillers in long-running animes?


That is mainly because battle centered animes, like Naruto or Bleach have a
lot of battle scenes. Battle scenes are much _much_ faster in Anime than it is
in Manga.

Plot centered animes, like One Piece or Death Note, can afford not to produce
as many fillers, because they can leave the gap far enough apart, as plot
events unfold not as much faster in Anime.

As for Naruto specific answer, the upcoming saga is filled with battles, in
order to compensate for the fast-pace anime, a sufficient gap needs to be
opened. I don't have exact numbers or calculations, but I'd like to think that
the anime producers do have some sort of plan, and that they would keep the
upcoming battle saga intact. Otherwise, guess who'll be delivering meteors to
their houses


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2012-12-13T16:04:37.127
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There are lots of possible explanations to that:

  * As you said, the anime catching up to the manga, so they have more time.
  * Special events, as anniversaries, movie-related specials or so.
  * Also, the narratives are different and that depends on the production team. In your example, Naruto (as Bleach did) commonly makes battles really fast-paced, so they tend to catch-up with the manga quickly. Whereas One Piece, while having lots of battle too, tends to make them less dynamic, so in the end, they are longer and don't catch up to manga as easily.


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2012-12-13T16:09:18.270
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An anime is typically adapted from another source material. Usually it's
either a manga, a light novel series (like Haruhi), or even visual
novel/computer game (Little Busters!, the When They Cry series).

Some parts maybe cut, changed, rearranges, and sometimes new content is added
all together scenes completely.

While some changes are welcomed by fans, most are not. One most unwelcome
additions are the so called filler episodes. A filler episode can be as short
as 1 episode, or as long as an entire season of the anime. These episodes were
not a part of the original source content's story, and usually serve
absolutely no purpose in furthering the main story.

One of the two main reasons that we see fillers because they are meant to buy
time for the anime when the content catches up to the pace the source
material. This delay give the authors some time to adapt more material for the
anime. After all, you can't really adapt something that doesn't exist yet.

The other reason for fillers to exist is greed. Some productions like to milk
an anime for more money by making a few episodes of filler in a season, to add
to disc sales (so fan buy _n+1_ discs instead of _n_ ). Anime productions
usually make the bulk of their money in disc sales.

Generally, fans don't like fillers for the following reasons:

  1. They are pointless, and don't add to the plot of character development in any menaingful way. Sometimes it takes away from the action and go on bizarre tangets only to end up exactly where they began (it's was all a dream!).
  2. They sometimes add plotholes or other contradictions to storyline and a considered non-canonical. 
  3. They (usually) aren't written by the same author as the original source material, so the quality and vision of the story might not be up to standards.


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