Here we’ve preserved Eliza Janssen’s short and sweet reviews of the top animated movies that have sadly since been removed from their original streaming platforms. You can find their current streaming homes by clicking each title.
The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson make a fine pair of collaborators—kinda like their film’s camaraderie between explorer Tintin and hapless Captain Haddock. Hergé’s globe-trotting comics are brought to life via sophisticated motion-capture tech, and whether it works as a convincing facsimile of reality or not is pretty irrelevant (it mostly does). What’s important here are the giddy chase sequences and fight choreography, the sense of wonder that brings to mind an Indiana Jones animated adventure.
The Breadwinner (2017)
Cartoon Saloon have made a name for themselves with intricate, profound animated stories of Irish folklore—you might’ve been dazzled by The Secret of Kells and Wolfwalkers, but missed this understated Kabul-set drama. Definitely not one to watch with fidgety kids, The Breadwinner is instead a sobering story of a young girl forced into disguise to provide for her family under Taliban rule. It’s a more topical watch than ever these days, but not without its moments of playfulness and grace.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)
Hallelujah it’s raining food, in this high-energy comedy based on a beloved 1970s children’s book. It’s made by the guys behind The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street, so it’s naturally packed with jokes, delivered by a voice cast of comedy pros Bill Hader, Anna Faris, Bruce Campbell and Mr T as a hysterically macho cop. Plus there’s a great gag deconstructing that dumb trope where a nerdy girl takes off her glasses and lets down her hair and she’s instantly hot.
Corpse Bride (2005)
Stick-thin, pale-faced Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter? Singing Danny Elfman music and twirling their way through a gothic stop-motion world? It’s gotta be a Tim Burton joint, actually the first animated feature he ever directed after producing the similarly ooky Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. Corpse Bride is a labour of love, and it blends together the macabre and the merry in a way even skittish younger audiences can appreciate.
Flushed Away (2006)
Hugh Jackman voices Roddy, a spoiled pet rat who gets flushed down the toilet to the shanty city of Ratropolis, in one of Aardman’s less loved feature films. It’s frankly pretty gross, with singing choirs of CGI slugs and Ian McKellen as an evil toad overlord. But that’s probably why kids (and overgrown kids) will enjoy it so much; it’s like Toy Story but with more poop jokes!
The House (2022)
One of the freshest additions to Netflix’s animated library, this sinister stop-motion has three generations of fuzzy families living under same accursed roof, in three separate but equally disturbing tales. A voice cast of UK talent breathes life into the sweetly-modelled humans, rats, and cats, but it’s no use: everyone who enters this place, viewer included, is in for an unforgettably nasty stay.
How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
Nerdy viking Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) must kill a dragon to prove that he’s a real warrior—but what’s he meant to do, when he can’t bring himself to take down the rare and cuddly one he captures? This fantasy-adventure flick has spawned a bunch of sequels and spin-off TV series, and it’s not hard to see why: the injured dragon Toothless is a triumph of character design, and young dreamers will quickly get caught up in How To Train Your Dragon’s sprawling world-building. Plus that orchestral score slaps.
Kung Fu Panda (2008)
Starring Jack Black as its does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title character, this Dreamworks family film could’ve been a lazy animated endeavour. Instead, it’s got exciting martial arts sequences, ambitious visual style and emotional storytelling to get Pixar quivering with envy. The all-star voice cast includes Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Seth Rogen, Ian McShane and James Hong as the protagonist’s duck dad (it’s explained in one of the sequels, idk).
The Little Prince (2015)
A singular combination of existential post-war philosophy and childlike whimsy, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella Le Petit Prince could only come out of France. This adaptation surprisingly keeps most of that profound imagination, necessarily broadening a simple story for Netflix’s bigger audience while nicely blending CG and stop-motion styles. Jeff Bridges and Claire Foy voice an elderly aviator and his young companion, as they dream about an unusual boy living alone on an asteroid.
Rango (2011)
A little bleak and idiosyncratic, Rango uses a similar fish-out-of-water format as kids movie fare like Shark Tale, Flushed Away (above), so on and so forth. But with a sun-bleached Western setting, Gore Verbinski’s computer-animated oddity distinguishes itself. Actors like Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, and a terrifying Bill Nighy appeared on a rudimentary set to act out their gangly character’s lines in person before that footage inspired animators, and it comes across in the film’s rangy physical comedy.
Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse (2018)
So many Spider-Mans, so little time. Just when audiences were beginning to feel a little fatigued with countless Peter Parker origin stories, this imaginative and expansive Sony animated film flipped the very concept of the character’s multi-textuality into its own killer superhero movie. Clumsy teen Miles Morales is our main focus, but the elastic storytelling includes many more incarnations, like a schlubby Peter B. Parker and Nicolas Cage as the slightly ridiculous Spider-Man Noir.
Your Name (2016)
It’s hard to overstate how much of a sensation this romance anime was upon release. In Japan, it beat Star Wars, Pixar, and the mighty Shin Godzilla himself to top the box office for a record-breaking 12 weeks, and international audiences seem to have fallen deeply in love too. Taki and Mitsuha are two 17-year-old students who swap bodies; at first they’re purely shocked and titillated, but after a while, they begin to have feelings for the mysterious other whose life they’re forced to experience.
