The Best Animated Films Not Made by Pixar or Disney, Ranked

Disney and Pixar have spent decades making animation feel like their private playground. But some of the medium’s sharpest, strangest and most beautiful films came from studios willing to draw outside those familiar lines.

From stop-motion foxes to hand-drawn Irish wolves, these movies prove there’s a lot more to animation than princesses, talking toys and emotional opening montages designed to ruin your afternoon.

10. The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)

A family road trip collides with a robot apocalypse, which sounds like the setup for 90 minutes of frantic jokes. Instead, The Mitchells vs. the Machines turns into a smart story about parents trying, and frequently failing, to understand who their children are becoming.

Sony Pictures Animation fills practically every frame with doodles, pop-ups and visual punchlines without losing the emotional thread. Critics responded too: the film sits at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.

9. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Wes Anderson was always going to make a stop-motion movie look like Wes Anderson. Tiny corduroy suits, symmetrical compositions, meticulously arranged rooms and George Clooney sounding amused with himself are all present.

But Fantastic Mr. Fox works because the immaculate surface hides a messy character. Mr. Fox is charming, selfish and permanently tempted by one more bad decision. The film earned approximately $46 million worldwide against a reported $40 million budget, but its reputation has aged far better than those numbers suggest.

8. Wolfwalkers (2020)

Cartoon Saloon’s Wolfwalkers looks like an illustrated storybook that decided to start moving.

Set in 17th-century Ireland, it follows Robyn, an English hunter’s daughter who befriends Mebh, a girl connected to a magical pack of wolves. The angular city and wild, flowing forest feel like opposing worlds before anyone says a word. Its 99% Rotten Tomatoes score reflects just how confidently the film combines folklore, friendship and political tension.

7. Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

LAIKA has built its reputation on making stop-motion films that you occasionally have to remind yourself are stop-motion. Kubo and the Two Strings may be its most visually ambitious example.

The story follows a boy armed with a magical shamisen as he searches for his father’s armor while pursued by supernatural enemies. It cost about $60 million and made roughly $78 million worldwide, modest numbers for a film containing some astonishing physical animation.

And yes, Coraline fans can start typing angry comments now.

6. Persepolis (2007)

Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud turned Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel into something Hollywood animation rarely attempts: a funny, angry coming-of-age story shaped by revolution, repression and exile.

The stark black-and-white artwork makes Persepolis instantly recognizable, but the personality keeps it from becoming a history lesson. Marjane can be stubborn, ridiculous and painfully vulnerable. That messiness is exactly why the politics hit.

5. The Triplets of Belleville (2003)

There’s almost nothing else quite like Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville.

Dialogue barely matters. Instead, Chomet builds comedy from grotesquely exaggerated bodies, bicycles, music, dogs and three elderly performers whose stage act involves household objects. It received two Academy Award nominations, including Best Animated Feature, and remains a useful cure for anyone who thinks animated storytelling requires celebrity voice actors constantly explaining the plot.

4. How to Train Your Dragon (2010)

DreamWorks has made louder movies and funnier movies. It hasn’t made many better ones.

Hiccup’s friendship with Toothless works because the movie gives it time. Their early scenes depend on gestures, suspicion and gradual trust rather than endless dialogue. Then John Powell’s score kicks in and the flying sequences turn the whole thing into something enormous.

Released in 2010, the film earned about $217 million in the US and holds a 99% Rotten Tomatoes score. More importantly, Toothless still behaves more convincingly like a cat than most animated cats.

3. The Iron Giant (1999)

Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant contains one of animation’s great friendships: a lonely boy and an enormous weapon from space who doesn’t want to be one.

The Cold War setting gives that relationship real weight. Adults see invasion, military hardware and communist paranoia. Hogarth sees a friend.

Its theatrical performance was brutal. The movie reportedly cost around $50 million and earned only about $31 million worldwide, yet it later became one of the clearest examples of a box-office failure finding the audience it deserved.

“Superman.”

One word. Still devastating.

2. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Plenty of superhero films tell you their hero is different. Into the Spider-Verse actually looks different.

Comic-book dots, deliberately varied frame rates, graffiti textures and competing animation styles turn Miles Morales’ world into something that feels printed, painted and animated at once. Then the film backs all that technique with a beautifully simple idea: becoming Spider-Man doesn’t mean becoming Peter Parker.

The movie earned approximately $395 million worldwide and has a 97% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. Its influence is now visible across mainstream animation, but the original still feels unusually alive.

1. The Wild Robot (2024)

DreamWorks took a robot, dropped her onto an island full of animals and made one of its most emotionally precise films.

Roz begins as a machine looking for tasks and slowly becomes the adoptive mother of an orphaned gosling named Brightbill. That setup could've become unbearably sentimental. Director Chris Sanders keeps finding tougher ideas underneath it: parenthood means preparing someone to leave you, kindness can be learned, and survival sometimes depends on changing what you were built to do.

The painterly environments help too. Instead of chasing photorealism, The Wild Robot lets forests blur into color and light, giving the island the texture of concept art in motion.

For now, it takes the top spot because it combines everything this list rewards: a distinctive visual identity, emotional clarity and a story that works whether you’re eight or 38.

Why You Should Care

Animation gets much more interesting once you stop treating Disney and Pixar as the default setting. Sony, DreamWorks, LAIKA, Cartoon Saloon and independent filmmakers have spent years pushing the medium toward different visual styles, stranger stories and audiences that extend well beyond children.

You don't need to become an animation obsessive. You just need to look a little further down the streaming menu.

What to Watch Next

Start with Coraline if Kubo and the Two Strings made you curious about LAIKA’s beautifully creepy stop-motion work. Then try Song of the Sea, another Cartoon Saloon film with the handmade visual personality that makes Wolfwalkers so memorable.

And if Into the Spider-Verse is your pick for number one and you’re furious about its placement here, watch Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse again. You’ve probably already got your argument prepared anyway.