The last movie currently on the Studio Ghibli docket, Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s gorgeous feature about an asthmatic girl who meets a strange friend in the country shows the animation house continuing to raise the bar on lavish, detailed imagery. 

Brad Bird’s first directorial failure comes with a big, bright moral—and so many sloppy narrative choices and unanswered questions that it’s impossible to focus on the wonder.

Disney cashes in on one of its most storied properties with this retrograde live-action fairy tale, which time-travels back to 1950 while adding plenty of sparkly 21st-century CGI effects. 

After Sleeping Beauty, feature animation was looking too time-consuming and expensive for Disney to continue, but technology came to the rescue with this charmer, leading the studio to a profitable new era. 

A trippy show for kids and stoners returns to theaters after more than a decade away, having given the kid-fans time to become stoner-fans.

Michael Bond’s Paddington books, dating back to 1958, seem ill-suited to the 21st century, but this charming British animated film retains the bear’s gentleness and drollery while opening up to some CGI hijinks. 

Third time is not the charm for the regrettably popular Night At The Museum franchise, which squanders Robin Williams’ Teddy Roosevelt in another effects-heavy noisemaker posing as education advocacy. 

Will Gluck’s musical doesn’t adapt the familiar Little Orphan Annie of the 1930s to present-day Harlem all that gracefully, but Quvenzhané Wallis’ preternatural charm does a lot to compensate. 

Tomm Moore’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated The Secret Of Kells is an even more beautiful and personal animated adventure that’s drawn from Irish history and the legend of the “selkies.”