Even last winter it was obvious that this year would be stacked with new animated feature classics. Fresh TMNT and Spider-Verse films were well on their way, as early as April, The Super Mario Bros. Movie Ground Pounded the box office and, in Suzume, a mythical worm threatened to do the same to Japan’s metropolitan centers. It’s been a huge year for original work from directors like Hayao Miyazaki and Alberto Vázquez but also for splashy IP comebacks alike. Somehow, in the age of content removals and cost reductions, we even wound up getting a Venture Bros. movie — and it ruled! It didn’t come without a cost: We’ll never get back the time spent watching Disney’s godawful Wish, Adam Sandler’s so-called comedy Leo, and the irredeemably bad Trolls Band Together. Feel free to skip those in your end-of-year catch-up. Watch the best animated movies of the year instead.
10.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie
The year’s biggest, silliest IP grab was also one of its hottest at the box office — now a $1.36 billion worldwide hit that topped every other 2023 release until Barbie rolled around. The Chris Pratt–led movie has made nearly 40 times what the notorious live-action Super Mario Bros. flop did 30 years ago. And it’s also pretty good for what it is: a highly watchable, 92-minute color wheel of Nintendo fan service. Its spins through Mario game mainstays like the Mushroom Kingdom, the Jungle Kingdom, and Rainbow Road are all delightful. Though The Super Mario Bros. Movie takes basically no narrative risks, it’s also not as irritating as a more winking movie would have been. Directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic give Mario about as simple a character arc as his games do, liberally mine elements from those games, and cram them in as many of Illumination’s thrillingly artistic sequences as the run time can support. We call that an “Okey dokey!â€
9.
The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart
The new Venture Bros. film might take you a couple of sittings to get through. Not because it’s a slog, but because you simply won’t want the movie, and the 20-year franchise as a whole, to end. Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart may be a direct-to-video release, but for fans of the show — which aired its sprawling, often cryptic, highly self-referential story over seven intermittently released seasons — it’s Tony sitting down in the diner at the end of The Sopranos. Like that finale, whether you want more or whether you think it’s just right, Radiant packs ideas and symbolism galore into its 84 minutes. It’s also a story with many intentional misdirects, red herrings, and undercuts of the audience’s expectations. By the end, the film impressively delivers closure to the relationships between the obsessive Monarch and his archenemy, Dr. Rusty Venture, as well as the bond between Rusty’s sons, Hank and Dean, but like all of Venture Bros.’s best button endings, it will keep you yelling for more.
8.
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
They still plot, they still scheme, they are still organized — even when faced with the threat of pacification and pulverization into nuggets. The long-awaited Chicken Run sequel may not improve much on the original film, but it delivers on almost everything you could want from a return to its stop-motion world. In Dawn of the Nugget, Ginger, Rocky, and their daughter, Molly, need to orchestrate a new breakout once they learn that Mrs. Tweedy has remarried and found a way to enthrall chickens so that they become docile and easier to kill. All your faves are back, even if not all of them are played by their original voice actors (we miss Julia Sawalha; we do not miss Mel Gibson!), and Bella Ramsey’s Molly introduces a new generational riff to the chickens’ dynamic. Dawn of the Nugget doesn’t quite re-coop the lightning of the original, but it’s a lean, highly polished film, and the stop-motion action sequences are especially a treat.
7.
Unicorn Wars
The “Care Bears meets Apocalypse Now†label this movie’s gotten isn’t an exaggeration. Director Alberto Vazquez’s movie pits colorful, cuddly cubs against a mysterious race of black unicorns in bloody, vengeful conflict. This one of the funniest and most grotesque animated fantasy films of the decade — in which we get to know an adorable, richly designed cast of ursine characters before they meet their brutally gory ends. Along the way, Unicorn Wars offers commentary on the nature of conflict and the human bear condition, ultimately making a statement on militarism, propaganda, and religion. “All empires and all nations have their narratives to justify the wars,†Vazquez has said in an interview. Unicorn Wars is the sort of film that has no realistic shot at something like an Academy Award, even for animation, but it’s a great example of what the medium is capable of achieving.
6.
Blue Giant
Blue Giant will convince you jazz is capable of space travel — if you needed convincing, that is. In the bars of Tokyo, its teen heroes Dai, Yukinori, and Shunji strive to be great musicians, forming a band laughably named JASS and practicing day and night as they try to play the hottest club in town. The setup is nothing groundbreaking, but the performance sequences are out of this world, literally. In scenes where the band is really feeling it, the animation’s clean linework gives way to abstractions: Dai blows kaleidoscopic streams of fire out of his sax, Yukinori distorts the whole piano as his fingers tickle the keys, and Shunji sends sparks of light flashing every time he hits the drum kit. The film excels at visualizing not just the difficulty of rigorous musicianship but the transcendent feeling of hearing or playing something beautiful. At one point, we know they are physically playing a club, but we’re watching their souls making music together in the heart of a supermassive black hole — blissfully caught up in the vortex of their vibe. You might get caught up in it, too.
5.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
If Mutant Mayhem’s single test was to distinguish itself within the various canons of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle–dom, it passed with flying colors. The first thing you’ll notice while watching is its indelible art style, awash with gouache-infused paints and textures (apparently inspired by school-notebook doodles). The second is the script, which foregrounds the raucous dynamic between Leo, Raph, Donnie, and Mikey (“Do we not have last names?â€) and their relationship to Splinter (“Dad†to them — be still my heart), and fills the rest of the screen time with Gen-Z-aware jokes about TikTok and Attack on Titan. The movie’s origin-story plot sends them gallivanting across New York to battle Superfly, a gang leader and fellow mutant with designs on ruling the world. Did I mention the soundtrack is full of incredible hip-hop, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did the score? Turtles forever.
4.
Nimona
In 2021, years into the film’s development at Blue Sky Studios (the animation shop behind Ice Age), the staff of Nimona got tragic news: Its new owners at Disney were killing Blue Sky after acquiring its parent company Fox, and the film — reportedly after Disney execs whined about a same-sex kiss — was to be buried along with the studio. Two and a half years later, the film is finally out, after a rescue by Annapurna Pictures, DNEG Animation, and Netflix, and it is far better than anyone could have hoped. Based on the comic by ND Stevenson, Nimona is a queer parable about a shape-shifter who refuses to adhere to society’s rules for what she should look like or whom she should present as. When she meets a knight, Ballister Boldheart, who is falsely accused of killing the queen, the two team up and take a stand against the repressive order that previously employed him. Nimona’s action is staged in a stylized blend of 2-D and 3-D animation, which crescendos toward a kaiju-size climax. But the way the film foregrounds the friendship between the ever-fluid Nimona and her gay bestie Boldheart, voiced respectively by Chloë Grace Moretz and Riz Ahmed, is what makes it beautiful.
3.
Suzume
Makoto Shinkai, one of the best anime feature directors of the last 20 years, has released what might be his finest film yet. His newest teen protagonist, Suzume, has to prevent a mythologically huge worm from crashing into the nation’s cities and landscapes, practically traveling the entire length of Japan locking up inter-dimensional doors that have gone haywire to do so. Along the way, Shinkai balances his apocalyptic terrors with levity. Suzume is a fantastical road movie that, among other delights, features a mischievous talking cat, a cranky three-legged chair that can also talk (and hobble, run, and get into trouble), and several obvious and not-so-obvious winks at popular anime that came before it. Its director is known for throwing himself in every aspect of his productions, from the screenwriting to creating the storyboards and backgrounds, and he’s said that he made this film to reckon with Japan’s tragic, recent history of ecological disaster but also to make people laugh. Suzume aces that test.
2.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The labor that went into the Spider-Verse sequel’s hyperkinetic, ultrastylized animation is undeniable from the first scene — an opener that leads with pops of color and line work precisely timed to the aggressive pounding Gwen Stacy inflicts upon her drum kit. As a resident of Earth-65, she moves in a world of mood-ring watercolors, one of several uniquely illustrated universes the movie uses to show off its artistic chops and creative ambitions. Miles Morales looks fresher than ever, zipping and flipping and thwip!ing through the frame, and his character arc in this film is as compelling as it was in his first — a journey that cannily lets his attachments to his family and civilian future mirror the attachment he shares with his Spider-brethren and superhero destiny. Its plot stops short on a brutal cliffhanger, yes, but unlike other recent two-part films, the primary thematic threads of Across the Spider-Verse almost all find their conclusions. It’s not half a movie. In fact, it’s a more complete movie than most superhero fare dares to be these days. And stylistically, it’s self-evidently one of the most visually complex and inspired films of the decade.
1.
The Boy and the Heron
If you love the works of Studio Ghibli, you already have reason to be excited about Hayao Miyazaki’s first film in a decade. Like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke before it, the latest gem by the animation maestro conveys character through illustrated action whenever possible. Young Mahito shows us who he is in the way he dresses himself, walks, runs, and sneaks around the film’s richly hand-painted environments — which span a firebombed Tokyo, the verdant countryside, and fantasy worlds layered on top of our own. A family secret and a trip to one such magical realm challenge Mahito to wrestle with the trauma of losing his mother, but when Miyazaki animates melting bodies, talking birds, crackling infernos, and innumerable Kirby-like warawara sprites afloat, his forms move as persuasively as anything in the real world. Sixty years after Miyazaki worked his first animation job, The Boy and the Heron is the triumph of an artist whose eyes and pencils refuse to be still.
Other Animation Highlights From the Year
Throughout the year, Vulture maintained a “Best Animated Movies of the Year (So Far)†list. Many of those selections appear above in our top ten. Below, the rest of the films that stood out to them this year, presented in order of release date.
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
Incomprehensibly, this was the year’s best mermaid movie. The competition for that distinction wasn’t very strong, of course, but Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is nonetheless a fun little sea-monster mash about a young kraken whose powers awaken just as she tries to work up the courage to ask her crush to prom. She has to tap those powers and overcome her awkwardness around fitting in at school as she gets caught in a multigenerational war between her race and the mermaids. The animation and character designs are rubbery and noodly, in a good way, and the voice cast led by Lana Condor, Toni Collette, and Jane Fonda is excellent. Ruby Gillman’s not flawless: The plot feels a bit too close to Turning Red (though not nearly as earnest), and you may come away from it wondering who signed off on the illogical joke that everybody believes that the blue, wiggly-armed sea creatures living among humans are just “from Canada!†But it makes up for it elsewhere, with beautiful underwater sequences and a final mermaid-kraken showdown set to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Burning.â€
Elemental
Pixar’s 2023 effort may have been the summer’s biggest animation surprise. After initially lackluster box-office returns, Elemental held steady and went on to net about $500 million worldwide, becoming a legitimate hit in the process. Pixar’s love story between a fire element, Ember Lumen, and the water-based himbo of her dreams, Wade Ripple, offers plenty of charm and animation that both defies physics while simultaneously remaining reverent to it (see: the ways Wade lights a flame or makes rainbows, or how Ember changes colors as she touches different minerals). The literally steamy scene in which the two of them finally touch is heartfelt and attentively animated, as is the disastrous flood that threatens Firetown in the climax. Elemental isn’t perfect, and its metaphor for interracial dating doesn’t work if you think about it too hard, but it still tops several other animated releases this year, including its disastrous corporate cousin Wish.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Perhaps the least approachable film on this list, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman adapts not just one Haruki Murakami short story but six of them, borrowing its title from one of the author’s collections. Director Pierre Földes sets his film in the aftermath of the 2011 TÅhoku earthquake and tsunami, adapting the plot of “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,†in which an amphibian enlists a morose banker to prevent a giant worm from annihilating the city. Földes then uses that premise to weave more of Murakami’s stories into the narrative. (Suzume, coincidentally, was inspired by the same Japanese myths.) It’s animated in 2-D, with crisp line work and a muted color palette that sometimes slips into eerie, surreal territory before the end. Földes achieved this with a process similar to rotoscoping, staging live actors as reference models for much of the film’s action before his animators turned their artist into the finished, weird-in-a-good-way final product.