2023 Was the Year That Animated Movies Leveled Up

If there’s one great thing 2023 should be remembered for, it’s this: This has been an exhilarating year for animation fans.

Yes, 2023 is the year that animation fully leveled up. As a whole, this year’s offerings (and there are many, with 33 films eligible for the Best Animated Film Oscar, which is just a portion of the year's releases) are spectacular—an incredibly adventurous slate, both visually and artistically. And it’s not just major releases like Sony’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Pixar’s Elemental that are shaking things up. Animation from all over the world challenged conventions this year, creating fantastic-looking movies with distinct points of view. Even more conventionally animated films, like Migration and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, still offered breathtaking visuals.

Many of the year’s best animated films, however, come from far more unexpected places.

Animation takes a village—unless you’re Latvian animator Signe Baumane, who drew the majority of her film My Love Affair With Marriage by herself. It follows a woman from age 7 to 29, as she traces a string of unsuccessful relationships in an attempt to find inner peace. It took seven years for Baumane to complete, drawing each frame herself with pencil on paper—yet the film’s frank discussion of human psychology, sex, and gender feels strikingly modern.

Other European hand-drawn films have unique styles too. France’s incredibly sweet Ernest and Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia, the sequel to the Oscar-nominated original and directed by Jean-Christophe Roger and Julein Chheng, is like a storybook come to life with warm watercolors, making it a delectable treat for families. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the hyper-brightly colored Unicorn Wars from Spanish director Alberto Vázquez tells the story of a violent war between bears and unicorns. To do so, Vásquez uses his adorable cuddly teddy bear characters to brutal, entrancing effect.

In the fantastic anime Blue Giant, a film about an aspiring jazz band, slick hand-drawn animation merges with motion-captured, rotoscoped 3D during performances. It’s a bit jarring to see characters look and move differently all of a sudden, but the move makes sense. Capturing the intricacies and nuances of musical performance by hand is a rather insurmountable hurdle, but by merging styles, Blue Giant creates some of the most electric sequences of the year and conveys the extraordinary efforts behind perfecting your musical craft that wouldn’t have been possible with hand-drawn animation. It also works as a way to symbolize musicians tapping into new heights, as the 3D animation effectively expresses how they’re “in the zone,” playing more quickly and freely. It’s exciting to see an experiment pay off so handsomely.

Also from Japan, the electric, must-watch The First Slam Dunk takes a similar approach, merging 2D backgrounds with 3D characters. Based on a hugely popular manga by Takehiko Inoue (who also directed the film), the basketball drama is wildly entertaining, was a smash hit in Japan, and slides easily into the pantheon of all-time great sports movies. The animation style lends the film’s centerpiece basketball game an amazing intensity, as the advanced graphics allow the characters/players to move in remarkably realistic ways.

BreakThru films’ The Peasants employs its own breathtaking style. The Polish studio's follow-up to 2017’s Loving Vincent, is an interesting hybrid film: It was shot in live action, and a team of artists then painstakingly hand-painted every single frame. While the animators could paint a typical frame in a matter of hours, some took more than six months to complete. The result is nothing short of jaw-dropping, merging the worlds of live-action and animation to create something improbable: a painting coming to life before our very eyes. The Peasants may be relentlessly bleak in its storytelling, but visually it's one of the best-looking films of this, or any other year.

Other animated films innovated formally in other ways. Robot Dreams is a sweet, charmingly animated film in the style of Sara Varon’s graphic novel upon which it’s based. The film from Spanish director Pablo Berger takes place in New York City and doesn’t contain a single line of dialogue. It’s perhaps the single best distillation of the power of the animated medium released this year. Sentimental while refusing to pander, Robot Dreams relies entirely on music to explore a heartwarming story of friendship. By returning to the roots of the medium by recalling early Merrie Melodies and Silly Symphonies shorts, the film manages to reinvigorate the power of animation.

Even the biggest studios with more standardized CG animation were willing to experiment this year. Pixar’s Elemental pushes new technological innovations to bring elements like fire and water to life in convincing ways. It required a major upgrade for Pixar’s tech, and they utilized 150,000 cores—in layman’s terms, the brains of a computer—to get it done. Finding Nemo, as a comparison, required 923 cores to create its brilliantly lifelike water animations.

Netflix’s Nimona and Paramount’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, meanwhile, play around with the medium in other ways. Mutant Mayhem incorporates 2D elements into its world, with harsh lines, doodles, and scratches that are reminiscent of early animation. Nimona incorporates a distinct mode the filmmakers call “2.5D,” which replicates a traditional style with the depth of field and effects of computer animation. Taking inspiration from Eyvind Earle’s background designs for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, the film looks impressive and unique, finding a happy medium between traditional and CG animation, while also honoring the look of ND Stevenson’s graphic novel. With their differing effects, the both things have one thing in common: showing how CG can have a lot more dimensions than what we’re used to, especially when merged with more traditional elements. It fits into this year’s recurring theme of looking to the past to forge an exciting future.

For all the brilliance these films brought to the table in 2023, two particular movies stand just above the rest of their animated siblings. One offers a barrage of different elements, while the other follows a more familiar style. Yet both manage to evoke how exciting the future of animation is.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the sequel to Into the Spider-Verse, is the longest American animated feature film released by a major studio, at 140 minutes. But that runtime breezes by, as Spider-Verse pushes every boundary of what we expect from the medium. It stretches across all kinds of aesthetics, visually and formally, sometimes in the same scene—it’s chaotic, yet meticulously controlled. Each of the film’s universes has a completely different look, from heavy doses of watercolors to more comic-book references, all to dazzling effect. As major studio animation has grown a bit worse for wear over the years, relying on steadfast story and stylistic formulas and repetitive-looking animation, Spider-Verse blows all that out of the water, offering a hugely ambitious, wildly entertaining, and utterly gorgeous film.

Then there’s The Boy and the Heron, the long-awaited film from animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki. Heron builds upon Studio Ghibli’s well-known house style, going further than the studio has ever gone to create its most visually breathtaking work yet. The visual effects are especially remarkable, subtly infusing computer animation to bolster the film’s top-notch world-building. By both storytelling and stylistic measures, the film is Miyazaki at his most dreamlike: A young boy processes what he believes to be the death of his mother, until a talking heron tells him she’s still alive. From that point on, the film proves that anything that could happen can, and does, happen.

But there’s also a familiarity to it that’s rooted in nostalgia and some of the director's well-explored themes. But the exquisite animation, particularly the opening moments in a flame-engulfed Tokyo, adds subtle modern twists without alienating longtime fans. If Spider-Verse is a celebration of the future of animation, then The Boy and the Heron commemorates animation's storied past.

Yet all this is not to say that 2023 was a perfect year for animation. Disney’s tentpole feature Wish, its celebration of 100 years as a studio, not only had critics and viewers feeling like they were watching a lesser retread of previous Disney hits, but it has also struggled at the box office. DreamWorks’ Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, while charming, was the studio's second-biggest box office bomb to date. And while it was a smash hit, The Super Mario Bros. Movie is little more than a rote exercise in capitalizing on an IP in a new way.

At the same time, animation isn’t just setting the bar artistically, but they’re also paying off financially. That might not sound important—art is art, regardless of its financial success—but higher grosses mean these studios can keep pushing the boundaries further and further to deliver great art. Sure, Across the Spider-Verse is a superhero adaptation based on an incredibly well-known franchise, but the fact that something so artistically ambitious is one of the five highest-grossing films at the domestic box office this year is hugely encouraging.

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That success was also seen internationally. The Peasants is not only Poland’s official Oscar entry, but it was also the highest-grossing Polish film of the year. In Japan, both The First Slam Dunk and The Boy and the Heron have landed in the top five biggest films of 2023. The Boy and the Heron has proven extremely successful in the U.S. so far too, being the first Studio Ghibli film to ever come out on top on opening weekend.

The future is extremely bright when it comes to animation. Incredibly talented artists have created a stunningly diverse array of styles and stories on screen in 2023. But animation’s future isn’t just bright: It’s also absolutely astonishing to look at.