Animation & Cartoons

KPop Demon Hunters is a 2025 animated musical fantasy about Rumi, Mira and Zoey, a superstar trio whose secret work as demon hunters protects their fans. Their mission is threatened when the demonic Saja Boys arrive as an irresistible rival group.

Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans directed the film, which Sony Pictures Animation produced in partnership with Netflix. The original 100-minute feature and a separate sing-along edition are currently streaming in the United States with a Netflix subscription.

Transformers One is a 2024 animated prequel to the entire Transformers franchise, directed by Josh Cooley and set on Cybertron long before Optimus Prime and Megatron became the greatest enemies in the known universe. The film answers the question embedded in every Transformers story: how did two beings who were once best friends and allies become the opposing leaders of the Autobots and Decepticons? What it discovers is a story about ambition, ideology, systemic oppression, and the particular tragedy of two people who share a dream but find themselves on opposite sides of the methods required to achieve it.

Chris Hemsworth voices Orion Pax, the future Optimus Prime — optimistic, loyal, and idealistic, a maintenance worker in a caste society who discovers that the Cybertron he loves is built on a lie. Brian Tyree Henry voices D-16, the future Megatron — brilliant, proud, and increasingly uncompromising, whose understanding of that same lie leads him toward a different and more violent conclusion. Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Jon Hamm, and Steve Buscemi round out the cast in a film that plays as both a franchise origin story and a surprisingly moving meditation on how friendships fracture under political and ideological pressure.

Transformers One arrived as the most critically acclaimed entry in the franchise in over a decade, with reviewers praising the film's emotional ambition, its gorgeous Cybertron production design, and the voice performances at its center — particularly Henry's D-16, who emerges as the film's most complex and sympathetic figure. It performed modestly at the box office relative to the live-action blockbusters that preceded it, but generated enormous goodwill from both longtime fans and newcomers who found in it something the franchise had rarely offered: a genuinely moving story about the costs of losing a friend to ideology. Available on Paramount+.

A Minecraft Movie bridges the gap between the beloved sandbox video game and the big screen, delivering a live-action/animated hybrid adventure that captures the blocky, creative spirit of one of history's best-selling games. When a group of unlikely heroes stumbles through a mysterious portal into the Overworld, they find themselves stranded in a vast pixelated realm filled with creepers, skeletons, and infinite landscapes waiting to be explored and built upon. With no guide and no map, they must learn the rules of this world quickly or risk never returning home.

Jack Black voices Steve, the legendary Minecraft character who has spent years surviving in the Overworld and now reluctantly agrees to mentor the stranded visitors. His comedic chemistry with the live-action cast drives much of the film's humor, while the central plot raises genuine stakes as a powerful villain threatens to corrupt the entire game world. The film balances family-friendly laughs with surprisingly tense set pieces that honor the survival-horror elements lurking in Minecraft's deeper biomes.

Directed by Jared Hess and produced by Legendary Entertainment and Warner Bros., A Minecraft Movie was one of the most anticipated video game adaptations ever made, and it largely delivered on that promise. The film's visual design carefully translates Minecraft's iconic aesthetic into a cinematic format without abandoning the charm of the source material. With strong performances, inventive world-building, and an infectious sense of fun, A Minecraft Movie is a love letter to one of gaming's most creative communities.

The Wild Robot is a 2024 animated feature film written and directed by Chris Sanders, produced by DreamWorks Animation, and based on Peter Brown's beloved 2016 middle-grade novel. The film follows ROZZUM unit 7134 — Roz — a robot who washes ashore on a remote, uninhabited island after a cargo ship disaster and must learn to survive in a wilderness she was never designed for. What begins as a behavioral study becomes something far more profound as Roz adopts an orphaned gosling she names Brightbill and discovers that the line between programming and purpose is not as clear as her code would suggest.

Lupita Nyong'o voices Roz with extraordinary nuance, conveying a mechanical being slowly coming to life through accumulated experience rather than designed capacity. Pedro Pascal provides warmth and sly humor as Fink, a scheming red fox who becomes an unlikely ally. The supporting cast includes Kit Connor, Mark Hamill, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, and Catherine O'Hara. DreamWorks' animation team developed a distinctive visual style that blends painterly naturalism — rich with the textures of wildlife illustration — with the crisp precision of contemporary computer animation, evoking the look of a living storybook.

The Wild Robot was released in September 2024 to rapturous critical reception and a strong domestic opening, eventually earning over $323 million worldwide against a production budget that made it one of the year's most commercially successful animated films. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards, completing one of the most acclaimed animated film campaigns in recent memory. Critics and audiences praised it equally for its emotional ambition, visual beauty, and its willingness to treat children's storytelling with the seriousness it deserves. The film streams on Peacock.

Three years after the events of the original film, Moana 2 sends the beloved wayfinder on her most ambitious voyage yet — a deep-sea journey across uncharted Polynesian waters to find a legendary island hidden by the demigod Nalo. Auli'i Cravalho returns with unmistakable warmth as Moana, now a seasoned navigator leading a crew of fellow voyagers rather than sailing alone. The film expands the world of the original significantly, introducing new cultures, creatures, and musical traditions rooted in authentic Polynesian mythology.

Maui (Dwayne Johnson) rejoins the adventure with his signature humor intact, though the sequel wisely pushes both characters to grow beyond their original dynamic. New characters — including Moana's spirited younger sister Simea and the inventive Loto — add fresh energy to the ensemble, while action sequences reach a scale beyond anything attempted in the first film. Directors Dana Ledoux Miller, David G. Derrick Jr., and Jason Hand bring kinetic visual energy that turns every ocean sequence into a dazzling spectacle.

Moana 2 is a film genuinely committed to delivering on every promise of its predecessor while charting bold new territory. Lin-Manuel Miranda, Abigail Barlow, and Emily Bear deliver a robust new song roster that echoes the original's emotional range while introducing its own musical identity. It is a sequel that respects its audience, offering adventure, heart, and mythology in generous measure.

Flow (2024), the Latvian animated film directed by Gints Zilbalodis, is one of the most remarkable cinematic achievements of recent years — a feature made almost entirely by a single person over four years, using open-source software, with no dialogue and no human characters. The film follows a small black cat who survives a catastrophic flood and must share a boat with an unlikely assortment of animals: a capybara, a lemur, a dog, and a secretary bird. What unfolds is a wordless odyssey of survival, distrust, and ultimately fragile cooperation across a submerged world of breathtaking visual invention.

Zilbalodis builds his film entirely through image and sound. There is no narrator, no exposition, and no anthropomorphism beyond the bare fact of survival instinct. The animals behave as animals — curious, cautious, territorial, occasionally cruel — and yet the film's emotional architecture is extraordinarily sophisticated. The cat's journey from solitary wariness to something approaching trust forms the spine of the story, rendered with a patience and precision that most big-studio animated films never achieve.

Flow won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 97th Oscars, making it the first Latvian film to win in that category and one of the rare non-English-language animated films to take the prize over major studio contenders. Its victory was widely celebrated as recognition of what independent animation can achieve outside the traditional production machine.

Inside Out 2 is a 2024 animated fantasy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures, directed by Kelsey Mann in his feature directorial debut. The film is the sequel to Pixar's 2015 Academy Award-winning Inside Out, returning to the premise of emotions as characters living inside the minds of their human hosts. Pete Docter, who directed the original, returned as chief creative officer and executive producer alongside producer Mark Nielsen, with a screenplay by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein.

The story follows Riley Andersen on the threshold of adolescence, arriving at high school for the first time and experiencing the profound emotional upheaval of puberty — a shift that floods Headquarters with a new wave of emotions led by Anxiety, voiced with nervous, well-meaning urgency by Maya Hawke. Anxiety rapidly sidelines Joy and her established colleagues in a desperate, misguided attempt to engineer Riley's future self into someone others will accept. Amy Poehler returns as Joy alongside Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Tony Hale, and Liza Lapira, with Ayo Edebiri, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Paul Walter Hauser, and Grace Lu joining as new emotions Envy, Ennui, Embarrassment, and Nostalgia.

Inside Out 2 became the highest-grossing animated film in history at the time of its release, earning over $1.6 billion worldwide — a result that stunned the industry and reaffirmed Pixar's unmatched ability to communicate complex emotional truths through animation. Critics praised the film's empathetic, precise portrayal of adolescent anxiety and identity formation, finding it a worthy and emotionally resonant successor to the original. It received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 2025 Oscars.