This is a passion project of mine, which started out when I began to watch Naruto with my girlfriend.
After finishing the whole anime (including Shippuden) I must say it's well worth watching.
This reddit post offers a nice summary of the main ideas and lessons learned from the Naruto show. Still, as good as the series are, the primary reason for this project is the excessive amount of fillers that made it tedious to watch.
- redundant and long flashbacks, recaps of events that happened an episode or few episodes before
- side story episodes that doesn't add to the underlying story (the characters/events in these arcs doesn't reappear, nor have any impact on the overarching story line)
- choppy sequences (jumping between more events that happen at once, combined with recaps and flashbacks making these story bits chaotic - one episode (23 mins) had only 7 mins of new content.)
As a newcomer to the franchise I've found this utterly annoying and I wanted to change it immediately. Maybe you felt the similar way! The series doesn't respect the viewers' time and it drags on just to fill up the 23 minutes of the episode - maybe I'm too old for this... 'stuff' (29 at the time).
I've decided to follow the manga and cut out the unnecessary parts and episodes which doesn't add to the overall story; splicing the chunks together and creating longer, more cohesive episodes.
I hope you'll enjoy the edited version.
Episodes 1 to 5 of Naruto edited into a no-filler version to be more manga-like.
▶️ DTube