From The Boy and the Heron to Flow, the a clear bias toward Disney, Best Animated Feature almost always does.
There are two schools of thought about the Oscars’ Best Animated Feature category. On the one hand, animated movies are just as valid as any other movies and shouldn’t need their own separate category. But on the other hand, animation is an art form of its own, with its own skillset and visual language distinguishing it from live-action cinema. The animated winners of the current decade have proven that with rich themes, striking imagery, and universal storytelling. They’ve all been great, but which Best Animated Feature winner of the 2020s is really the best of the best?
5 Encanto
Directed By Byron Howard & Jared Bush
It shows just how great the 2020s’ Best Animated Feature winners have been that Encanto is the least great one of the bunch. Encanto flips the usual magical realist formula. Rather than telling a story in which the main character achieves a unique magical power that makes them special, like Neo or Peter Parker, Encanto revolves around a character who’s the only one in her family without a magical ability.
Encanto uses a moving fantasy tale and a series of delightfully catchy songs to explore transgenerational trauma.
What makes Mirabel special is that nothing makes her special. There’s a great message in there that all kids need to hear: you are good enough. Encanto uses a moving fantasy tale and a series of delightfully catchy songs to explore transgenerational trauma. Stephanie Beatriz leads a star-studded voice cast with a wonderfully emotional performance that made Mirabel an instant icon.
Thanks to Lin-Manuel Miranda, Encanto has one of Disney’s greatest soundtracks, with unforgettable musical numbers like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” bringing the story to life. Encanto might not be as profound or thematically rich as other Oscar winners like Flow and The Boy and the Heron, but it is a hugely entertaining, deeply touching fairy tale.
4 Soul
Directed By Pete Docter
After teaching kids how to deal with death in Coco, Pixar took them into the afterlife in Soul. In recent years, a lot of Pixar films have felt like they’re trying too hard to be a Pixar film. The Pixar brand is well-established, and rather than following where a given story or character wants to go, Pixar tends to use that brand as a North Star.
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After giving lovable personalities to our toys, our pets, our emotions, and the monsters under our beds, Pixar has been anthropomorphizing things that don’t need to be anthropomorphized, like puberty and the classical elements. On paper, a movie about personified souls in the great beyond sounds like pure Pixar, but it ends up being a bit too abstract to connect in the way that Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Coco did.
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Still, Soul is an undeniably powerful film that ends on a really poignant message. Joe Gardner spends the whole movie trying to get to his favorite jazz club in time to play the gig of a lifetime, but even when he achieves his lifelong dream, it doesn’t give him the fulfillment he expected. There’s an important lesson in there about appreciating the moment.
3 The Boy And The Heron
Directed By Hayao Miyazaki
The Boy and the Heron’s Oscar win was as much a lifetime achievement award for writer-director Hayao Miyazaki as it was a recognition of the film itself. Miyazaki planned The Boy and the Heron to be his final movie, so it was the Academy’s last chance to honor one of the most innovative and brilliant animators in the field. The Boy and the Heron might not be Miyazaki’s greatest work — that title would go to Spirited Away — but it is an emotionally captivating coming-of-age story framed in a fantastical world.
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The Boy and the Heron
- Release Date
- July 14, 2023
- Runtime
- 124 Minutes
WHERE TO WATCH
Miyazaki used this tale of a lonely boy befriending a talking bird to confront his own childhood. The filmmaker processes the loss of his mother and his wartime relocation to the countryside through this soulful animated opus. As one of Miyazaki’s most personal stories, The Boy and the Heron was the perfect note to end his career on.
2 Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio
Directed By Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, co-directed with Mark Gustafson, is a rare example of an adaptation whose changes actually elevate and improve on the original story. In this version, Geppetto had a young son, Carlo, who was killed in an aerial bombardment during World War I. Making Geppetto a grieving father added so much dramatic depth to Carlo Collodi’s classic narrative.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio has a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
It’s no longer just a simple tale about a puppet who becomes a real boy; it’s about a broken man who suffered the worst possible kind of loss and creates a living puppet to give himself another chance at fatherhood. The backdrop of Fascist Italy gives the story more texture, too. Like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, del Toro’s Pinocchio uses an archetypal fantasy as an escape from the bleak realities of war.
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Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
- Release Date
- December 9, 2022
- Runtime
- 114 minutes
WHERE TO WATCH
Stop-motion is a uniquely beautiful animated medium that breathes life into inanimate objects. It was the perfect medium in which to tell the Pinocchio story, because Pinocchio himself is an inanimate object that comes to life; in a sense, his entire existence is stop-motion. This is an animated movie where the animation style itself reflects the story and its lead character.
1 Flow
Directed By Gints Zilbalodis
The latest Best Animated Feature winner — the 2025 victor, Flow — is also the best of the decade so far. A lot of acclaimed animated movies are just regular movies that happen to be animated. They have typical dialogue, character dynamics, and three-act stories that could be translated into a live-action film (and, in the hands of Disney, often have been). But Flow is a rare animated movie that tells its story entirely through its animation. It conveys a sweeping adventure and a ton of characterization without saying a word.
On top of being beautifully rendered with vibrant colors and impressive scope, Flow’s animation is refreshingly grounded.
Flow follows a cat — not a talking cat or an anthropomorphic cat, just a normal cat — as it tries to survive in a post-apocalyptic world with rising water levels. On top of being beautifully rendered with vibrant colors and impressive scope, Flow’s animation is refreshingly grounded. The animals move and behave like real animals, which adds to the stakes. It doesn’t play like a trivial cartoon; it’s a realistic portrayal of the animal kingdom’s fight for survival in a natural disaster caused by humanity’s carelessness. Flow offers a startling look at the potential effects of climate change without getting preachy.
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The Oscars’ Best Animated Feature winners of the 2020s have included some truly incredible films, from Miyazaki’s swansong to del Toro’s stop-motion ion project. There’s been so much masterfully crafted animation in this decade that there’s usually more than one nominee deserving of a win. The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse would all be worthy recipients of the award. But Flow’s gorgeous animation and groundbreaking nonverbal storytelling are head and shoulders above all of them. Flow has set a very high bar for next year’s animated winner at the Oscars.
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