How Was 2024’s Feature Animation?

Here we are, two months into 2025: A new year, a clean slate, and a new batch of animated films to check out. Before we take a full step into 2025’s animation, let’s speak about the 2024 lineup of animated films that came out and speak of the overall year, since 2024 was, to put it lightly, an empty year for animated films. 

Now, to be clear, that doesn’t mean nothing came out. That’s absurd. There are a lot of great animated films from the US side of things, like Inside Out 2, The Wild Robot, Ultraman Rising, Transformers One, and Piece by Piece. When I say it has felt empty this year, it’s not only the variety of films that we received, but how they were released. 2023 also had a bit of this problem, but it feels like whatever is going on behind the scenes with these studios, especially how studios are kneecapping creativity for the sake of saving money and making as much of it as possible, is finally bleeding out into not only the films themselves but the release strategies. 

As much as I want to talk about the 2024 situation, a good example of how weird 2024 was would be to look at the planned releases of 2025. The only US major animated film from early 2025 that we are getting is Dogman. You could count Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and The Colors Within, but those are considered 2024 releases. Anyway, Dogman is the only US major animated film coming out for the first third of the year coming from a major studio. Thankfully, many smaller releases are getting peppered through February and March. Still, if you only want to count major theatrical releases, then we aren’t getting another major studio release until June. (And for some reason, we are supposedly getting two animated films about stories from the Bible, but that’s a whole weird topic to talk about for another time.) Why the heck are animated films getting spread out so thinly? That is what 2024 was with animation as well. You get one animated film, and then months pass before they put out another one in theaters. Sure, there were smaller releases, but considering how most audience-goers don’t care about the smaller releases, they might as well just be dead air. 2023 and 2024 shared an odd case of leaving large vasts of the year empty, with nothing to give to those family- and animation-loving audiences. Animated films generally tend to be major money-makers for theaters, and yet they have made sure families go without getting something for months. The industry thinks certain types of movies like superhero movies and live-action remakes are for “all ages,” and they don’t have to rely on animated film releases to get butts in seats. They are stuck in their ways with that mindset when the typical go-getters from Marvel and Disney’s live-action remakes are now not getting the butts in seats. The old reliables are no longer as reliable as they used to be. The studios now think it would be a good idea to stack animated films one week before or after the release of an extremely hyped animated feature. This is what happened to films like Transformers One coming out a week before The Wild Robot. Transformers One had one of the worst-received trailers of last year and The Wild Robot was the most hyped animated film of last year. Well, what did they think was going to happen? It’s a shame too, because Transformers One was fantastic. 

Another big issue with the vast gap between animated film releases of last year was the fact that there wasn’t much to look forward to. As usual, It’s good to keep in mind that making films is never a straightforward thing, and anything and everything can happen during production. It’s a miracle when any film that gets made, in any state of Hollywood, gets made at all and put into theaters or on streaming services. With that being said, 2024 didn’t have a lot to look forward to. With the foreign/indie animation scene being unpredictable, the US theatrical scene was lackluster. When it wasn’t one of the films folks were excited about, what we had left were films like Garfield with its odd un-Garfield take on the sarcastic feline. Despicable Me 4 had an odd finality to its story, like it was going off with a bang, when the stories have been the franchise’s weakest aspect. While Kung Fu Panda 4 was overall enjoyed, it felt like a step backward from the previous films in the story department. Most people, despite proclaiming that they want 2D animated films in theaters no matter what, bailed and avoided The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim. Moana 2 was a cobbled-together disaster that may have made its company a ton of money based on hype and love for the original sea-faring adventure from 2016, but has overall done long-term damage for Disney as a brand pushing out stale sequels that don’t do anything new, compelling, or intriguing. DreamWorks had a jarring slate of releases that varied in quality in the streaming department with the award-winning Orion and the Dark being a thoughtful and whimsically compelling family film about a boy dealing with his fear of the dark and the worries of life, while also delivering MegaMind vs The Doom Syndicate: far and away, sadly enough, the worst film I saw last year. 

Netflix may have had the incredible and funny Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and the endearing Ultraman Rising with its found family plot beats mixed with a deeply personal broken familial connection storyline on top of its giant monster action, but they also had the underwhelming Thelma The Unicorn, the lackluster Skydance Animated offering Spellbound, and not much else. That Christmas somehow got a few nominations, but will anyone remember this jumbled mess of a Christmas movie until they look for some kind of animated Christmas film to watch on Netflix that isn’t the timeless Klaus? 

Even the foreign animation scene felt lightweight compared to the previous year’s offerings. Granted, any year would have difficulty following up 2023, with Robot Dreams and The Boy and the Heron. Yes, we did get some amazing movies like Mars Express, Chicken for Linda, and Sirocco and The Kingdom of the Wind, but audiences have made known that they do not care about watching French animation in theaters which results in the distributors poorly handling their releases. We had a few popular animated films from Japan, like the vibe-heavy and musically inclined The Colors Within from the fantastic Naoko Yamada, Studio Ponoc’s imagination-filled The Imaginary, and the oddball Totoro-style journey about life Ghost Cat Anzu. With that said, the only animated film from Japan that people remotely cared about outside of the usual franchise film fare or three-episode debut “films” of franchises like Dan Da Dan was the short but bittersweet story of two manga authors, Look Back. If it wasn’t for the huge acclaim that both Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow and Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail received, this might have been one of the lightest years for foreign feature film offerings of recent memory. 

So, yes, there were still plenty of amazing movies from all over the world. Even weaker years like 2011 and 2017 always had something, even when the major US studios weren’t batting at their best. This year is no different. It simply felt like there was more time waiting for the next feature to hit streaming or theaters, and when they underwhelmed, you were stuck waiting a month or two for the next big animated feature to try again. One could describe it as a hot mess, since when the films were hot, they were hot. When they were a mess, they were a real mess.

2025, as if I haven’t been clear enough, will be another trial of patience with animation fans and moviegoers who support the medium. If you have already seen DreamWorks and Peter Hasting’s adaptation of Dav Pilkey’s Dogman, then make sure to check out The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep when it hits Netflix and The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie when it hits theaters in March. Then again, I would rather wait for the next big animated film to hit theaters, which is Pixar’s Elio in June (barring any smaller releases that hit streaming or other theatrical releases), than go see something like the upcoming Disney live-action remakes or a majority of comic book movies. It’s aggravating when studios get so tunnel vision with what they think audiences want because studios think those are the only family entertainment worth spending money on. Despite the fact it seems like the industry hates animation with its very being, I’m always hoping every year brings a bountiful offering of animated experiences made by immensely talented creatives and artists. To end this editorial on a happy note, here are my favorite animated films from 2024 that flew under the radar.

• Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Wind
• Chicken for Linda
• The Imaginary
• Mars Express
• The Colors Within 
• Ghost Cat Anzu
• Ultraman Rising
• Piece by Piece  
• Her Blue Sky (Technically a 2019 release, but Netflix finally released it on their service in 2024)