The Best Animated Movies for the Whole Family
These are the animated films worth a whole family's evening: the ones that delight a six-year-old and still hold a grown-up's full attention. The classics are here, from My Neighbor Totoro to Toy Story, but so is the remarkable run of the last few years, including two recent Oscar winners in Flow and KPop Demon Hunters.
The most useful way to choose is gentle versus intense. My Neighbor Totoro, WALL-E and Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl carry almost no menace and suit the youngest viewers. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Spirited Away and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse are tense, sometimes frightening films that play best from eight or nine. A third group isn't scary at all but is properly sad: Up, Coco and The Wild Robot catch out more families than any monster does.
Every note gives a rough starting age and flags what tends to upset younger kids. For a mixed room with no time to preview, Toy Story and Encanto are the safest bets. Flow has no dialogue at all, and Spirited Away works dubbed or subtitled. For the newest releases, see New Family Movies Worth Watching; for animation made with adults in mind, see Animated Movies for Grown-Ups.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Movie · 2018The film that changed what mainstream animation looks like, mixing comic-book dots, hand-drawn lines and several styles in a single frame. Best from about eight: the villain and his henchmen are hulking and menacing, a family death in the second half lands hard, and a flashback shows the villain's wife and son killed.
The Wild Robot
Movie · 2024A lost robot learns to mother a gosling on a wild island, animated to look like a painting that moves. It's funny far more often than the premise suggests. The accident that kills the gosling's mother, some predator scenes and the other geese teasing him make it better from about seven than for preschoolers.
Toy Story
Movie · 1995More than thirty years on, still the cleanest storytelling in animation: jealousy, friendship and a rescue mission with nothing wasted. Safe from four up. The only real scare is the bedroom full of mutilated toys next door, which frightens some preschoolers more than it should.
My Neighbor Totoro
Movie · 1988Studio Ghibli's gentlest film and the place to start a toddler. Very little happens, and that's the charm: two sisters, an old house, rain at a bus stop and a cat that is also a bus. The English dub is excellent. Fine from three.
Coco
Movie · 2017Pixar's most beautiful film to look at, a land of the dead lit like a city of marigolds and candles. Good from about six. The skeletons are friendly rather than scary, but the story is about dead relatives and a great-grandmother's fading memory, so expect questions and probably tears.
Inside Out
Movie · 2015Animation doing something live action can't: showing what happens inside an eleven-year-old who has just moved to a new city. Fine from five for the jokes, better from eight for the ideas. A sad turn involving a forgotten imaginary friend is the moment kids remember.
The Mitchells vs. the Machines
Movie · 2021Drawn to look like a teenager's sketchbook come to life, with doodles and memes scribbled over the frame. A family road trip runs straight into a robot uprising, and the jokes rarely stop. Good from about seven; some chases are frantic and one mall sequence plays like a horror spoof.
Spirited Away
Movie · 2001The first Studio Ghibli film to win the Oscar, and the closest thing here to a real dream: a ten-year-old is trapped in a bathhouse for spirits after her parents turn into pigs. Best from about eight. Some images are strange and a few frightening, notably No-Face's rampage.
Ratatouille
Movie · 2007A rat who wants to cook in a Paris kitchen, told with the precision of a great comedy. Fine from five; the scariest bits are an old woman firing a shotgun at rats, a tumble through the sewers and a shop window of dead rats in traps. A food critic's speech near the end is aimed squarely at the adults.
KPop Demon Hunters
Movie · 2025The animated phenomenon of 2025, and the Oscar winner for best animated feature: three K-pop stars who secretly fight demons, with songs that topped real charts. Best from about eight. Demon fights are frequent, some faces are scary, and the rival boy band's numbers are flirtatious.
WALL-E
Movie · 2008A trash-compacting robot alone on an abandoned Earth. The first stretch is almost wordless, which makes it unusually good for young children who can't follow dialogue-heavy plots. Fine from four; the few scares are brief, mostly WALL-E being badly broken near the end, and its points about waste and screens land with the parents.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Movie · 2022A sequel nobody asked for that turned out to be one of the best animated films of the decade, with a painterly look and a real fear of dying at its heart. Death appears as a whistling wolf who is honestly frightening, so this is for about eight and up.
Flow
Movie · 2024A cat, a flood and a boat full of other animals, told without a word of dialogue, and it won the Oscar over the big studios. About six and up, with care: the animals are in real danger, one large animal seems to die near the end, and the ending is quiet and open rather than tidy.
Up
Movie · 2009The opening montage is the most famous sequence in modern animation and will make every adult cry, while small kids mostly won't notice why. After that it's a funny adventure with a talking dog and a giant bird. Best from about seven, though: the villain has a gun and a pack of fierce dogs.
Zootopia
Movie · 2016A city where every district is built to a different species' scale, packed with visual gags for kids and a detective plot about prejudice that holds up for adults. Good from six. A few scenes of predators losing control and attacking are the scariest moments, and both heroes get bullied as kids in flashbacks.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Movie · 2024Aardman's clay animation at its most handmade, every thumbprint visible. Wallace's new robot garden gnome goes rogue, and an old penguin enemy returns. Gentle enough for six-year-olds, clever enough for anyone, and short, though the penguin's quiet menace and his marching gnomes unsettle some younger kids. Fans of The Wrong Trousers get a proper payoff.
The Iron Giant
Movie · 1999Brad Bird's first feature: a hand-drawn Cold War story about a boy hiding a giant robot from a paranoid government agent. Best from about seven. There's mild swearing played for laughs and a hunter shooting a deer, and the ending has left generations of kids in tears.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Movie · 2023Even more inventive than the first film, with every universe drawn in its own style. It's long and stops on a cliffhanger, which matters with kids: they will ask what happens next. Best from about nine: fights are intense, the plot hinges on Miles's father being fated to die, and a flashback shows a girl vanishing in her father's arms.
Wolfwalkers
Movie · 2020Hand-drawn in Ireland and the best-looking film here that many families haven't heard of: a hunter's daughter in 1650 befriends a girl who becomes a wolf when she sleeps. Best from about eight. Town boys bully the heroine, the last act has real violence against the wolves, and the town's ruler is a harsh, frightening figure.
Encanto
Movie · 2021A musical about a magical Colombian family whose gifts hide a lot of pressure. Fine from about five: there's no real villain and little peril, though a brief flashback shows the grandfather struck down by raiders. The songs are relentless earworms, so expect it to be requested again tomorrow.
How to Train Your Dragon
Movie · 2010A Viking boy befriends the dragon he was supposed to kill, and the flying scenes are still among the best in animation, lifted by a soaring score. Good from about six. The final battle against an enormous dragon is loud and frightening for the youngest, and the stakes are real.
Hoppers
Movie · 2026Pixar's 2026 original and one of its funniest: a college student moves her mind into a robotic beaver to protect a woodland glade from a highway. The animal politics are gloriously silly and the eco message is light. Best from about eight; predators eat prey on screen, and the finale gets intense and a little scary.
Still can't decide? Let us pick →
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