I’d wager my very last tree star on it.
When KPop Demon Hunters arrived on Netflix in June 2025, the internet collectively lost the plot. Hundreds of millions of views followed. There was even a theatrical run, a rarity for a Netflix Original that began on the streamer. It ballooned so quickly that retailers are still playing catch-up on merchandise, from Lego sets to video games.
And honestly, the appeal isn’t hard to understand. Those songs lodge themselves in your brain for days, and the film is funnier and more action-packed than anybody could reasonably have expected.
Still, while everyone else keeps taking victory laps, allow me to mention as politely as possible that Netflix is home to other animated movies. Better ones, if I may. A few have aged into classics. A few delivered something genuinely fresh to fandoms that have existed for decades. And a few landed straight on Netflix, made far less noise, and are arguably the stronger films regardless.
So if KPop Demon Hunters-mania has started to wear on you, keep scrolling past it and give these five a shot instead.
The one that shares KPop Demon Hunters’ DNA
You might not guess how much The Mitchells vs. the Machines has in common with the film of the moment. Both are animated features from Sony Pictures Animation. Both skipped theaters for Netflix. The Mitchells racked up more than 50 million views on the platform within a month, nowhere near KPop Demon Hunters’ numbers, but enough to rank it among the biggest releases of the pandemic era.
Mike Rianda wrote and directed it, tracking the profoundly dysfunctional Mitchell family as they road-trip to deliver Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson) to college. Then the robot apocalypse breaks out, and a megalomaniacal AI system abducts every human on the planet apart from the Mitchells.
The jokes connect, and the art style, a mix of 3D and 2D elements, resembles nothing else out there. What makes it linger, though, is how personal it is. Those family dynamics feel authentic because they were pulled more or less directly from Rianda’s own relatives, something the filmmaker talked about in depth around the movie’s fifth anniversary.
The kids’ movie about attempted murder
On my first viewing of The Willoughbys, I’d have bet money it was adapted from Roald Dahl. It’s a dark comedy pitched at children, centered on four oddball kids whose parents are so awful and neglectful that the children resolve to kill them by orchestrating the most lethal vacation imaginable.
Dahl had nothing to do with it. The source is a book by Lois Lowry, the Newbery Medal-winning writer behind The Giver and much more.
The comparison still holds up, in my view. Director Kris Pearn pairs a childlike whimsy with humor far too bleak for the intended audience, handled with such a silly, artful touch that taking it seriously is impossible. Everything about the presentation says “just for kids.” In practice it’s tremendous fun at any age, and this straight-to-Netflix release earned a far larger audience than it found.
The Turtles movie that converted the haters
Of all the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles incarnations, the 2018 series Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles may be the most divisive of the lot. It cultivated a rabid fanbase while attracting nonstop online derision from old-school TMNT purists. Supporters cite the high-quality animation and the writing, which is sharp, fast and funny. Detractors cite the changes: a reworked origin story, a Master Splinter (Eric Bauza) rewritten as something of a jerk, Raphael (Omar Miller) at the head of the team, and Leonardo (Ben Schwartz) downgraded to a smartass quipster.
Then came Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie on Netflix in 2022, and plenty of fans who loathed the series walked away stunned.
The setting is a future in which a brain-like alien species called the Krang has conquered Earth. Hoping to head off the invasion before it begins, the young soldier Casey Jones (Haley Joel Osment) is sent back to the early 2020s by his commander, Leonardo. From there, Casey must prod the young, mouthy Leo toward discovering the leader inside him and stopping the Krang.
At its core, it’s the story of Leonardo becoming Leonardo. That’s precisely why such a broad swath of TMNT fans embraced it. Calling it perfect may be a reach, but if the Turtles matter to you at all, it’s required viewing.
Don Bluth’s dinosaur heartbreaker
Netflix’s animation shelf isn’t limited to its own productions. A handful of bona fide classics live there too, and none surpasses The Land Before Time, a sweet, funny, gorgeously animated tearjerker from animation legend Don Bluth. A band of mismatched orphan dinosaurs journeys toward the great valley, a lush, vegetation-rich stretch of land their herd departed for after famine struck.
Walt Disney hired Bluth in 1955, and he spent decades at the studio before quitting over creative differences and launching Don Bluth Productions in 1979. His studio wouldn’t make it through the 1990s. During the 1980s, though, it produced a string of wonderful films, among them An American Tail in 1986 and The Land Before Time in 1988, each packing as much heart, humor and beautiful animation as Disney’s finest.
The Oscar winner with a tougher field
Yes, the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film at the 2026 Oscars went to KPop Demon Hunters. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse claimed the same prize in a year when the competition was considerably stiffer.
Miles Morales takes up the Spider-Man mantle following Peter Parker’s death, and after a radioactive spider bites him as well. His first genuine outing as Spider-Man goes interdimensional once Kingpin rips open the multiverse and dumps a handful of other spider-powered heroes into his home dimension.
The affection for it comes down to the breakthrough animation, which honored the craft of comic books more completely than perhaps any animated film before it. The cast is killer. And the story fully justified the trilogy it launched.
The soundtrack also beats KPop Demon Hunters. I said what I said.