The 10 Best Animated Movies On Netflix Right Now

Laika

Last Updated: October 24th

It’s easy for animation buffs to get discouraged flipping through Netflix Instant’s animated offerings, which skew heavily toward mass-produced kiddie TV programs and dire-looking CGI direct-to-video sequels. But a little digging turns up quite a few unexpected animated gems — and what Netflix’s animated offerings lack in depth, they make up for in breadth. There’s a surprising amount of variety among the animated features available on the platform, spanning a wide range of studios, techniques, and countries of origin, and films of both the blockbuster and indie variety.

Although Netflix has done away with a lot of its more mature animated offerings, there’s still something here for everyone. The range of techniques and narrative approaches on display here highlights what makes the animation medium so exciting and fruitful: There’s no limit to what can be made to appear on screen, through the judicious application of creativity and craft. So here are the 10 best animated movies on Netflix right now.

Fantastic Fest

April And The Extraordinary World (2015)
In an alternate version of 1941 where France has been led by a line of Napoleons and leading scientists mysteriously disappear, young April, her talking cat Darwin, and the shady Julius go searching for April’s missing parents. It’s an interesting take on a history where technological advancement isn’t a thing, where “steampunk” is actually a plausible reality and TVs and cars don’t exist. April’s journey starts in the dreary, stuck-out-of-time France but leads her to fantastical advancements that still make sense in the world we’re presented with. The heart of the film lies in the love that plucky, stubborn April has for those she cares about, and it’s driven by charming animation and a genuinely interesting concept. It’s a fun trip that’s just out-there enough for adults while being accessible for the young and young at heart.

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Walt Disney Feature Animation

Zootopia (2016)
In this fictional world, predator and prey have learned to live together and even get actuarial jobs. Judy Hopps (a rabbit, unsurprisingly) flees her humble carrot farm upbringing to pursue her dream of becoming a police officer in the fast-paced city of Zootopia. To prove herself, she has to work together with a (also unsurprisingly) sly fox to uncover a beast of a mystery. The 2016 film has received praise due to its complex — albeit somewhat muddled — portrayal of racial tensions and stereotypes, but that’s only one layer of Zootopia‘s appeal. Although the movie originally centered on the fox, the final version rightly shifted its focus to the quick-witted Judy, finding a strong female character to pull this complicated tale together. It gets dark, though, despite it toning it down from older drafts. Push aside all the cultural themes depicted, and you’ve still got a widely entertaining and smart animated film.

Laika

Kubo And The Two Strings (2016)
This Oscar-nominated tale follows Kubo, his talking guardian Monkey, and the samurai Beetle on their quest to acquire enchanted artifacts needed to destroy evil spirits. It takes the familiar magical hero’s journey and puts its own heartfelt and music-inspired twists on it. A feat of stop-motion animation, the making-of process for Kubo is almost as compelling as the story itself, with the film rightly including a time lapse of production along with the credits.

Warner Bros.

The Iron Giant (1999)
It’s a tale as old as time: Boy meets giant robot. Boy befriends giant robot. Government tries to find and destroy iron giant. Who didn’t face problems like that in their youth? Set in a post-Sputnik 1957, Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant centers on sci-fi obsessed Hogarth Hughes as he protects his new pet/BFF/unstoppable killing machine (voiced by a then-relatively unknown Vin Diesel). The story captures the fear and paranoia of the space race and makes it palatable for youths who’ve never heard “duck and cover” before. It was a truly scary time in U.S. history, and just imagine how worse it would be if a huge metal man showed up out of nowhere. Its a fun story, though, and is filled with genuinely funny moments and top-notch animation.

Disney

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Jack Skellington, local hero and king of scare in Halloween Town, gets bored of scaring kids year after year and decides to steal a different holiday after stumbling into Christmas Town. And it goes about as well as you’d imagine a Christmas brought to you by ghosts, ghouls, and a guy with an ax in his head. It’s a dark yet jovial tale in an intricately designed world, but it’s the memorable songs that bring the stop-motion animation to life. It’s a Halloween/Christmas classic that could really only be done justice by Tim Burton.

Shout! Factory

The Last Unicorn (1982)
The 1982 Rankin-Bass adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s fantasy novel The Last Unicorn is very much an artifact of its fantasy-obsessed era. But as nostalgia objects go, this is one worth revisiting. The episodic narrative — which follows a unicorn seeking more of her kind, and almost losing herself along the way — is pitched at a children’s-movie level, but the script (penned by Beagle himself) injects a lot of sophistication and poignancy into a fairly typical hero’s journey. That sophistication extends to the visuals, which tower above a lot of the cheap children’s entertainment of the era, thanks to the collaboration between Rankin-Bass and the short-lived studio Topcraft, members of whom would go on to form the storied Studio Ghibli.

Dreamworks

Chicken Run (2000)
The action sequences in 2000’s Chicken Run are among the liveliest and most inventive in modern animation — which is saying something, considering they’re all stop-motion. The feature-film debut from British studio Aardman (the droll geniuses who brought the world Wallace and Gromit) draws heavily on the classic 1963 John Sturges WWII epic The Great Escape for its plot and structure, only with chickens and egg farmers in place of British POWs and the Gestapo. The smooshy, slapstick-y Aardman touch undercuts the gravitas of its inspiration considerably, resulting in a whiz-bang action-comedy that’s just as exciting for its visual and comedic inventiveness as it is for its plot. Chicken Run remains the highest-grossing stop-motion-animated film ever, a big, bright feather in Aardman Animation’s cap.

Warner Bros.

Corpse Bride (2005)
The Corpse Bride is not the best stop-motion-animated film with Tim Burton’s name on it (that would be The Nightmare Before Christmas, which he co-wrote and produced), but it may very well be the most Tim Burton-y. Setting aside the fact that it features the voice talents of longtime Burton favs Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, The Corpse Bride revels in the highly stylized, gleefully ghoulish milieu that Burton claimed as his own nearly 20 years earlier with Beetlejuice. The story is simple enough — after accidentally marrying a dead woman, a Victorian-era man is whisked away to a strange underworld — but it allows Burton and his collaborators to romp around inside a dark, whimsical world that’s only made more delightful through its puppet-based animation style. More than 10 years on, The Corpse Bride’s remarkably detailed world remains compelling and beautiful, and well worth revisiting in between Nightmare re-watches.

Disney

Fantasia (1940)
The presence of Fantasia almost makes up for the slim pickings of Disney movies on Netflix. The 1940 classical-music anthology film remains a hallmark of the Disney Animation brand, due to its audacious-for-the-time ambition and its timeless appeal. The marriage of art and classical music in Fantasia grew out of Disney’s Silly Symphonies series of shorts, and the film’s eight animated segments each deserve their own entry in the animation canon. The Mickey-starring “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and the grand finale “Night On Bald Mountain” are the big, enduring draws, but there’s so much more to Fantasia that’s worth experiencing in full, like the lovely Greco-Roman world of “The Pastoral Symphony” and the comic animal-kingdom ballet of “Dance of the Hours.”

The House Of Small Cubes (2008)

This Oscar-winner for Best Animated Short is only 12 minutes long, but that’s all it takes to pull you into its heartbreaking story. An old man’s house gets continuously submerged in ever-rising waters, so instead of moving on, he moves up. As he keeps adding levels, a dropped pipe forces the man to relive his memories as he passes each floor through the depths of his home. The wordless short builds an interesting world very quickly with a unique style of animation. The House Of Small Cubes gives but a few glimpses of this man’s life, but it’s enough to care about him and his life as it unfolds in reverse.