Why This Decade Was Different
Animated film has always carried an unfair stigma in Western critical culture: the assumption that it is fundamentally a children's medium, assessed on a separate and lower standard than live-action filmmaking. That assumption has been slowly and persistently dismantled over the past ten years by a wave of films from multiple countries that have demonstrated, repeatedly and undeniably, that animation can do things no other medium can.
The decade between 2014 and 2024 produced animated films that were formally innovative, emotionally devastating, politically engaged, and aesthetically revolutionary. They came from Japan, Ireland, the United States, and France. They were made by small studios and global corporations, by first-time directors and legendary masters. They proved that animation is not a genre, it is a medium, as wide in its possibilities as cinema itself.
The Films That Redefined Visual Style
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) is the most important animated film of the decade in terms of its influence on what animated film can look like. Sony's production house spent years developing a visual language that combined the aesthetic of comic book printing, Ben-Day dots, speed lines, misaligned color channels, with three-dimensional CG animation running at a variable frame rate designed to suggest hand-drawn movement. The result was unlike anything that had been seen before in mainstream animation. Every animated film made since has been in dialogue with it.
Wolfwalkers (2020), from Cartoon Saloon in Ireland, made the opposite aesthetic argument: that hand-drawn animation, with its visible line work and deliberate imperfection, has a visual power that digital production cannot replicate. Set in 17th-century Ireland during the Cromwellian conquest, the film uses different visual styles for different worlds, geometric and constrained for the English colonial settlement, loose and wild for the magical forest. It is a masterpiece of considered visual storytelling.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) demonstrated that a major Hollywood studio sequel could be genuinely innovative. DreamWorks Animation adopted a painterly, sketch-animation style influenced by Spider-Verse, and paired it with a story about mortality and the fear of death that is more philosophically serious than most live-action films aimed at adult audiences.
Emotional Storytelling That Transcended Genre
Coco (2017) is Pixar at the height of its emotional intelligence, a film about a Mexican boy who travels to the Land of the Dead, steeped in the tradition of Día de los Muertos, that manages to be simultaneously a family comedy, a mystery, and a meditation on memory, legacy, and how the dead live on in the living. Its final act contains one of the most effective emotional sequences in Pixar's history.
Turning Red (2022) is a smaller Pixar film that was received without proper appreciation upon its streaming release, a film about a thirteen-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl who transforms into a giant red panda whenever she experiences strong emotions. It is an exact and funny and moving account of adolescence, cultural identity, and the complicated love between mothers and daughters. It deserved a theatrical audience.
The Boy and the Heron (2023) is Hayao Miyazaki's long-awaited return from retirement, and it is among the most personal and formally strange films of his career, a grieving boy follows a heron into a tower that contains the collapsing remnants of a world his great-uncle built. It is a film about creation, inheritance, and the inevitability of imperfection that feels like a farewell and a beginning simultaneously. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
"Animation gives you access to a character's interior world in a way that live action fundamentally cannot. You can show thoughts, emotions, transformations, you are not limited by the physics of a real body in a real space. That is not a limitation of the medium. It is its greatest power."
International Animation Worth Seeking Out
The best animated films of the decade were not exclusively English-language productions. Several internationally produced films deserve attention from anyone serious about animation as art:
- The Tale of Princess Kaguya (2013, Japan): Isao Takahata's final film, animated in deliberately rough pencil lines, is among the most beautiful films ever made in any medium
- When Marnie Was There (2014, Japan): Studio Ghibli's quietly devastating film about loneliness and connection, based on Joan Robinson's novel
- The Wind Rises (2013, Japan): Miyazaki's most adult film, about the engineer who designed Japan's Zero fighter planes, wrestling with the ethics of beauty in service of destruction
- Song of the Sea (2014, Ireland): Cartoon Saloon's stunning adaptation of Irish selkie mythology, visually extraordinary
- I Lost My Body (2019, France): A severed hand travels through Paris searching for its owner in a film that is both formally inventive and emotionally rich
- Flee (2021, Denmark/France): A documentary animated film about an Afghan refugee recounting his experience fleeing Kabul, nominated for Best Documentary, Best Animated Feature, and Best International Film at the same Oscars
Animation's Next Decade
The decade that produced these films has left animation genuinely changed. The visual possibilities are wider than ever, the Spider-Verse aesthetic opened doors that will not close. The audience appetite for animated films that treat adult emotional themes seriously has been demonstrated conclusively. The international distribution reach of streaming means that French, Irish, and Japanese animation now reaches global audiences as easily as Hollywood productions.
What remains uncertain is whether the major studios will draw the correct conclusions from this decade's best films, that originality, visual risk, and emotional honesty produce work that lasts, or whether they will continue to optimize for sequels, franchise extensions, and the safety of the familiar. The independent and international studios have already shown the way. The question is who is paying attention.