The Best Animated Films Since 2020, Ranked

Animation has not been a genre for years, and the last six have made that impossible to ignore. Since 2020 the medium has produced folk horror, war films, studies in grief and one genuinely funny picture about a lighthouse inspector, and almost none of it was made for children. What follows is a ranked list of eleven features released between 2020 and 2026, each scored on our usual ten-point scale, chosen to show how far the technique stretches once nobody is treating it as a marketing category.

How This List Was Made

Every film here had a theatrical or licensed streaming release between January 2020 and September 2026, and every one was watched to the final credit rather than skimmed for its best scene. We are not counting shorts, television specials, or festival premieres that never reached a paying audience. Where a title opened in one country years before another, we date it by its first wide release instead of its festival slot.

Scores are our own editorial judgement, not an average of anybody else’s. We weigh what a film attempts against how completely it achieves it, and for animation we look hard at four crafts in particular: character animation, background art, colour scripting and sound design. A 9.2 and a 7.1 are both films we would happily recommend. The gap is about how much of the medium each one uses rather than merely borrows.

1. Lantern of the Fens, 9.2 / 10

Margit Solheim’s stop-motion feature is the most complete piece of animation of the decade so far, and it was built by a studio of around thirty people in a converted Bristol warehouse. A lamplighter’s apprentice inherits the job of keeping light on a fen village that has already drowned, rowing out each night to lamps nobody is left to read by. Solheim’s puppets are hand-tied and shot at twenty-four frames a second, and she refused digital cleanup, so the slight tremor in a shoulder reads as weather rather than error.

What lifts it above everything else here is the coordination of craft. The background art is painted on glass and backlit, which gives the fog a depth a compositor could not fake, and the sound recordist mixed reed, rope and the studio’s own floorboards into something that feels like a place. The colour script travels from amber to bog green across ninety minutes without ever announcing the shift. Its one fault is a middle reel that circles the same grief a beat longer than it needs to.

2. Paper Tides, 9.0 / 10

Ines Bardi drew every frame of Paper Tides by hand, scanned it, then threw the pencil lines away, which is why the film has the grain of a sketchbook rather than the polish of a studio. A cartographer’s widow keeps redrawing a coastline that will not stay where her late husband surveyed it, and the film treats that impossible task as a working life rather than a metaphor to be explained aloud. Studio Kestrel limited the watercolour backgrounds to six washes that cycle by act, and the result is the warmest film on this list.

3. Glasshouse Summer, 8.8 / 10

Olek Marchetti’s first animated feature looks like live action until somebody moves a little too smoothly. Set in a glassworks town during a heatwave that refuses to break, it follows a girl apprenticed to her grandfather’s final commission. Ardent Frame built the film in CG but lit it with real practical lamps, then deliberately reintroduced lens distortion, so the glassware throws genuine caustics across the characters’ faces. The sound design is the star: the ping and tick of cooling glass carries more emotion than the score, which is wisely kept almost silent.

4. Nine Bells for Aurore, 8.6 / 10

Camille Roux’s alpine folk tale is animated in a loose, unshaded line that makes the mountains look drawn by somebody who loved them and was slightly afraid of them. A bell-ringer returns to a valley evacuated before a dam was built, and the film is mostly about sound: the difference between a bell heard across water and one heard through it. Atelier Verne printed the whole thing on paper stock that yellows a little in the upper corner of every frame. It is gorgeous and a touch cold, which is roughly the point.

5. The Tin Orchard, 8.4 / 10

Devon Ashby’s CG feature about a rust-belt picking town that automates itself out of work is the most politically direct film here and, for two acts, the most kinetic. Northgate Animation gives every machine a distinct weight, so a harvester lumbers while a sorter darts, and the character work sells exhaustion in the shoulders rather than the face. It slips to fifth because the last twenty minutes reach for a reconciliation the film has not earned, and the colour scripting goes flat the moment the plot turns hopeful.

6. Moth Season, 8.2 / 10

Rosalind Achebe’s stop-motion chamber piece is set almost entirely in one room, which is a fearless thing to attempt in a medium this labour-intensive. A lepidopterist preparing a collection she no longer believes in is visited by a former student, and the film uses the physical awkwardness of puppets as social unease. Paper Lantern Studio dressed the set with real pinned specimens, and the flicker of the lights is the camera shutter rather than a filter. It runs ninety-two minutes and feels like a great short, which is meant as praise.

7. Salt and Sextant, 8.0 / 10

Tomas Kral’s ocean epic is the hybrid on this list, hand-drawn characters composited over CG water that was then repainted frame by frame. A navigator crosses a sea with no landmarks after her instruments fail, and the film is honest about boredom and cold in a way seafaring stories usually are not. Meridian Ink’s background art is astonishing: a rolling grey swell that never once repeats a wave. It ranks seventh only because the narration keeps explaining a theme the images had already settled.

8. The Long Quiet, 7.8 / 10

Haruka Endo’s CG drama follows a rural veterinarian snowed in with a farm she cannot reach, and it is the quietest film here. Lanternhouse animates faces with unusual restraint, letting stillness do the work, and the colour script is built almost entirely from one grey and one blue. The blizzard sequences are technically superb. What holds it back is a subplot about a brother that never quite connects to the spine of the story, and a resolution that arrives more gently than the setup deserved.

9. Koel, 7.6 / 10

Nandita Pillai’s hand-drawn debut is the most charming film on the list and the least disciplined. A girl on the Kerala coast feeds a koel bird that returns every monsoon, and the film runs on incident rather than argument, which is sometimes a joy and sometimes a wobble. The background art is extraordinary, all monsoon greens and wet terracotta, and the character animation has a looseness that reads as confidence rather than inexperience. It is ninth because the final act adds a character the story never needed.

10. Tinderbox, 7.4 / 10

Piotr Wasilewski builds a city out of matchsticks and then sets one street alight, which is as good a premise as stop-motion has had in years. Ember & Ash shoot on a miniature street lit from below, so the firelight is real and the shadows it throws are uncontrollable, which is exactly why they work. The film is only seventy minutes long and spends twenty of them establishing a politics it never dramatises. Still, nothing else here produced a single image as memorable as its burning street.

11. City of Small Machines, 7.1 / 10

Farid Haddad’s clockwork city is the most visually inventive film here and the most poorly told. Nine Volt designed a metropolis where every building is a mechanism, and watching the camera drift through the gearing is genuinely thrilling. The problem is the script, which introduces four protagonists and gives none of them enough to do, then resolves by having somebody explain the rules. It earns its place on craft alone, and it is the film here most likely to be remembered in ten years for what it looks like.

What the Medium Gets Right, and Where It Still Stumbles

Six years is long enough to see patterns. The films at the top of this list share a set of habits, and the ones at the bottom repeat a set of mistakes, and both are worth naming plainly.

The Verdict

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