Board Thread:Theories and Speculation/@comment-31672013-20180826005107/@comment-34194151-20180827222208

That's because the animators take liberties all the time. They often make changes to the source material to make it seem more coherent. You have to remeber that the anime is behind the manga. That means they saw naruto using shadow clones to prep sage mode, and then assumed jiraiya would have done the same thing when they added filler to the jiraiya vs pain fight. But anime only scenes aren't canon, because it isn't what the author depicted.