Disney and Pixar spent decades setting the standard for mainstream animation, and there are still plenty of Disney movies worth revisiting before their upcoming sequels. However, some of the best animated movies of the last five years have come from elsewhere. DreamWorks and Sony have experimented with striking new visual styles, while filmmakers including Hayao Miyazaki and Guillermo del Toro have shown how much room remains for traditional and stop-motion animation.

The Academy Awards tell part of the story. Disney has not won Best Animated Feature since Encanto took the prize in 2022. Since then, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, The Boy and the Heron, Flow, and KPop Demon Hunters have won the category in consecutive years. Even as plenty of forgotten Disney movies continue to hold up surprisingly well, some of animation’s most exciting recent work has come from outside the studio.

Awards only tell part of the story, though. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse became a blockbuster while pushing CG animation somewhere visually unexpected, and The Wild Robot became one of DreamWorks’ most acclaimed recent releases. Others breathed new life into franchises that had already been around for decades.

These eight movies are not ranked against each other. Instead, they represent some of the strongest animated films released outside Disney during a particularly exciting five-year stretch.

KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

KPop Demon Hunters arrived on Netflix in June 2025 and became something much bigger than another animated streaming release. The musical fantasy follows K-pop superstars Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, who balance their lives as HUNTR/X with a secret mission protecting humanity from demons.

The movie became Netflix’s most popular original title ever and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Its success is easy to understand. The action is energetic, the animation has its own identity, and the songs became hits outside the movie itself. The creators and cast of KPop Demon Hunters clearly tapped into something much bigger than a standard animated musical.

The Wild Robot (2024)

DreamWorks delivered one of its most moving movies in years with The Wild Robot. Adapted from Peter Brown’s novel and directed by Chris Sanders, the film follows Roz, a robot stranded on an island who gradually forms relationships with its animals and becomes the surrogate mother of an orphaned gosling named Brightbill.

Lupita Nyong’o gives Roz an enormous amount of warmth without losing the character’s mechanical origins. Just as memorable is the movie’s painterly animation, which makes the natural world feel closer to an illustrated storybook than conventional CG. The Wild Robot earned a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination and grossed more than $330 million worldwide.

Flow (2024)

There is no dialogue in Flow, and it doesn’t need any. Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis follows a solitary black cat whose home is destroyed by a massive flood. The cat boards a small boat with other animals, forcing creatures that would ordinarily avoid one another to survive together as the water continues to rise.

That simple premise becomes surprisingly emotional without relying on human voices or familiar animated-movie formulas. Flow also became a remarkable awards success, winning Best Animated Feature at the 2025 Academy Awards. Its comparatively small scale makes the accomplishment even more impressive beside the massive studio productions that usually dominate the category.

Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (2023)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse had already changed expectations for mainstream CG animation, which left its sequel with an enormous challenge. Across the Spider-Verse somehow became even more visually ambitious, sending Miles Morales through different dimensions that each possess their own distinctive animation styles.

It is also much more than a technical showcase. Miles’ conflict with Miguel O’Hara gives the movie an emotional argument about whether being Spider-Man requires accepting tragedy as inevitable. Audiences responded in a huge way: Across the Spider-Verse earned more than $690 million worldwide and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature.

The Boy And The Heron (2023)

Image By Joshua Fox

Hayao Miyazaki returned with The Boy and the Heron, his first feature in a decade and one of Studio Ghibli’s most visually extraordinary movies. Set during World War II, it centers on Mahito, a grieving boy who follows a mysterious gray heron into a strange world after moving to the countryside with his father.

Like many Miyazaki films, explaining the plot only gets someone so far. The movie moves between grief and fantasy with dreamlike logic, allowing Mahito’s journey to become increasingly surreal. Its place among the best anime movies of the 2020s was cemented when The Boy and the Heron won Best Animated Feature at the 2024 Academy Awards.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been rebooted so many times that another animated version could easily have felt unnecessary. Instead, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem found a reason to start over by emphasizing something surprisingly easy to forget about Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello: they are teenagers.

Actual teenage actors voice the four brothers, giving their conversations an appropriately messy energy. The movie’s sketch-like animation makes it stand apart from earlier TMNT adaptations, while its story lets the turtles behave like kids who desperately want friends and normal lives. It is one of the rare franchise reboots that immediately establishes its own personality.

Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (2022)

Few expected a sequel arriving 11 years after Puss in Boots to become one of DreamWorks’ best movies. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish begins with the famously fearless hero discovering that he has burned through eight of his nine lives, turning his latest adventure into an unexpectedly thoughtful story about mortality.

Like many family movies secretly made for adults, it gives younger viewers a colorful adventure while confronting something much heavier underneath. Its stylized action also gave the Shrek franchise a visual overhaul, helping The Last Wish earn more than $480 million worldwide and a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)

The same year Disney released its live-action Pinocchio remake, Guillermo del Toro offered a radically different interpretation of Carlo Collodi’s familiar story. His stop-motion version relocates much of the action to Fascist Italy and approaches Pinocchio’s creation through the grief of Geppetto, who has lost his human son.

The result is darker than most family adaptations of Pinocchio, but never needlessly grim. Del Toro uses the story to explore death, disobedience, and what makes a life meaningful, while the painstaking stop-motion work gives every character a physical presence. The movie won the 2023 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, beginning four consecutive non-Disney victories in the category.