Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.cbr.com
KPop Demon Hunters became the most-watched Netflix original movie in history, accumulating over 325 million views after its June 20, 2025 release. This is a staggering number for a film about a K-pop girl group who moonlight as demon hunters protecting an ancient barrier called the Honmoon from the villain Gwi-Ma’s supernatural boy band.
It is also, by the measure of what Netflix’s animated catalogue has achieved at its absolute peak, not the best thing the platform has ever produced. These five movies are a mix of mainstream hits and hidden gems, and some of the best animated fare out there — even beyond just Netflix.
Nimona Is The Most Subversive Animated Movie
Based on ND Stevenson’s acclaimed 2015 graphic novel and directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, Nimona arrived in June 2023 as one of the most inventive animated movies of the decade. Chloe Grace Moretz voices Nimona, a shapeshifting outcast who attaches herself to Ballister Boldheart, a newly knighted hero who has been framed for the queen’s murder.
Nimona uses its fantasy architecture to engage directly and honestly with questions of identity, belonging, and the violence that institutions inflict on people who refuse to fit into clean categories required to keep the institution going. It inches over KPop Demon Hunters for its emotional reach, because Nimona doesn’t try to dull or soften the pain that its main character goes through. It won the Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement for Animated Feature.
Ultraman: Rising Proved That Legacy IP Can Be Reinvented With Emotional Depth
Director Shannon Tindle’s 2024 reimagining of the 60-year-old Japanese Tokusatsu icon follows Ken Sato, a baseball star who reluctantly inherits the Ultraman mantle. He finds himself raising the orphaned baby of a kaiju he was supposed to fight. The kaiju battles are spectacular, rendered at a scale and feel that rivals theatrical blockbusters.
However, Ultraman: Rising’s real achievement is treating the terrifying, unglamorous reality of parenting something enormous and incomprehensible, and something that needs to be cared for, as its central subject. Gedde Watanabe and Julia Harriman voice Ken’s father and the Professor respectively, and the movie’s emotional core is the fractured relationship between the fractured relationship between Ken and his father, a former Ultraman himself. This movie uses mythology to ask harder questions about what is owed to the things that depend on others for their care, whereas KPop Demon Hunters uses it to stage a crowd-pleasing adventure.
The Sea Beast Is Netflix’s Most Cinematic Animated Film
Chris Williams, the Oscar-winning director of Big Hero 6 and Bolt, brought The Sea Beast to Netflix in July 2022 and produced the most visually ambitious animated movie on the platform. Karl Urban voices Jacob Holland, a legendary sea monster hunter whose worldview is upended when a stowaway girl named Maisie, voiced by Zaris-Angel Hator, forces him to confront the possibility that the creatures he has spent his life hunting are not the enemies the kingdom’s history books have told them they are.
The Sea Beast draws explicitly from the golden age of maritime adventure by Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Patrick O’Brian, and the result is an animated adventure with thematic heft. The monster designs are extraordinary, the ocean cinematography is exceptional, and the main message about how official histories are recorded is one that KPop Demon Hunters, for all its fun, never attempts.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio Dares To Be Different
Guillermo del Toro spent 15 years developing his stop-motion adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel of the same name, and the result won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 95th Academy Awards in 2023. Set in Mussolini’s Italy, del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson use the Pinocchio story as an allegory for fascism, obedience, and the radical act of choosing to live as oneself rather than the thing that authority demands.
Ewan McGregor voices Jiminy Cricket, David Bradley voices Geppetto, and Gregory Mann voices Pinocchio with a rawness and strangeness that makes his character feel more alive than any other adaptation. The stop-motion craft is extraordinary, with every frame constructed with staggering detail. Del Toro’s willingness to engage with death, grief, and political violence in a movie normally made for children makes KPop Demon Hunterslook far tamer in comparison.
The Mitchells Vs. The Machines Is Funny, Sweet, And Honest
Directed by the team behind Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Mike Rianda, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller), The Mitchells vs. the Machines arrived on Netflix in April 2021 and immediately set a new standard for what studio animated comedy could achieve. Katie Mitchell, a queer aspiring filmmaker, is about to leave for college when a robot apocalypse traps humanity and leaves her dysfunctional family as the world’s last hope.
The apocalypse is triggered by a vengeful AI voiced by Olivia Colman, and the movie uses Katie’s filmmaking obsession to develop a visual language, complete with doodles, overlays, and animated inserts. It is the most inventive approach to first-person animation perspective in the genre’s history. KPop Demon Hunters might have more views, but repairing a father-daughter relationship across generations in The Mitchells vs. the Machines has more heart.
