Naruto Watch Order

Watch Naruto (220 episodes), then Naruto: Shippuden (500 episodes). That is the entire order, and it hides the real question, which is not what to watch but what to skip: this franchise carries more filler than almost anything else its size, and the filler list is the companion page this one cannot do without.

The shape of the thing

The original series ran from 2002 to 2007 and covers the cast as children. Shippuden picks up after an in-story time skip of roughly two and a half years and runs to 500 episodes, finishing in 2017. There is no film, special or OVA you need between them; the time skip is the bridge, and the story explains itself on the far side.

Boruto, the sequel about the next generation, is a separate decision for another day. Nothing in the two main series depends on it.

Why the episode counts overstate the commitment

Seven hundred and twenty episodes is the number that scares people off, and it is misleading in a merciful direction. Roughly two of every five episodes across the franchise are anime-original filler, produced because the adaptation kept catching up to the manga and had to mark time. Skip the filler and the real commitment is somewhere near 430 episodes, which is still enormous but is a different genre of enormous.

The original series ends on the most notorious stretch of it: from episode 136 to the finale, the show is essentially one unbroken filler block, more than eighty episodes long, produced while the manga pulled ahead. The practical advice is blunt and this site will state it plainly on the filler page: the canonical story of the original series ends at episode 135, and Shippuden episode 1 follows on from it.

The films

There are eleven, and they are almost all standalone stories that touch nothing. The one exception worth knowing about is The Last: Naruto the Movie, which is canon, sits between the final two chapters of the manga, and settles a relationship the series proper leaves as subtext. If you watch one film, that is the one, and it belongs after Shippuden episode 493 or simply after finishing the series.

Sub or dub

Both are complete and both are defensible, which is not true of every long series. Worth knowing: some of the franchise's most quoted English lines are dub choices rather than translations, and a few are genuinely better than the literal alternative, an argument our Shikamaru page makes at length about two particular words.

Where to start if 720 episodes is a hard no

Start anyway, at episode one, and give it to the end of the Wave arc, roughly nineteen episodes. That arc is a complete argument in miniature: what the ninja system does to children, asked by a child inside it. If it does not land, the remaining seven hundred episodes are more of that question at higher stakes, and you can quit knowing you sampled the real thing rather than the throat-clearing.