Disney Plus's animation shelf spans this year's new record breakers and the Pixar and Disney classics that shaped what animation gets to be. This guide moves from the newest arrivals to the studio touchstones worth returning to, in the order they're most worth your time tonight.
Hoppers is the newest arrival and the easiest sell. Pixar's science fiction comedy imagines technology that lets a person's mind hop into a lifelike robotic animal, and animal lover Mabel uses it to actually talk to the creatures around her, uncovering more than she bargained for. Jon Hamm and Piper Curda lead the voice cast, and the film has become one of the year's biggest box office stories, backed by reviews as warm as its premise.
Zootopia 2 arrived nine years after the original and immediately became the biggest animated opening in box office history, then kept climbing to become the highest grossing animated release a Hollywood studio has ever put out. Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde are back on another case through the city, and the word of mouth behind it has been as strong as the numbers.
Moana 2 very nearly wasn't a movie at all. Disney originally developed it as a limited series for Disney Plus, and only pulled it back into a theatrical feature after seeing how well the early material played. That bet paid off. It opened to the biggest global animated debut of its time, sending Moana and Maui back into open water for a new voyage.
Toy Story is where all of this started. Released in 1995 as the first entirely computer animated feature film, it earned an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay, a first for an animated film, and a place in the National Film Registry a decade later. Woody and Buzz's rivalry still plays as sharp and as funny as anything Pixar has made since.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse builds a different animation style for nearly every universe Miles Morales passes through, from Gwen Stacy's watercolor world, where the colors shift with her mood, to Spider Punk's deliberately rough, cut and paste look. Miles himself moves on twos for a classic comic book feel, while Hobie moves on threes for something scrappier. It's one of the most inventive things animation has done this decade.
Inside Out 2 sends Riley into adolescence with a new cast of emotions crowding out the feelings she has relied on since the first film. It became the highest grossing animated film of all time on release, crossing a billion dollars faster than any animated movie before it, and it earns that response by taking a teenager's inner life seriously instead of playing it for easy laughs.
WALL·E opens with its title robot alone on an abandoned Earth for a long, almost wordless stretch, a choice director Andrew Stanton fought to protect through the whole production. The crew studied silent films from the 1920s and 30s to learn how to carry emotion without dialogue, and that discipline is why a trash compacting robot and a sleek scanner drone can carry a love story with barely a line of speech between them.
Big Hero 6 turns an obscure 1998 Marvel Comics team into something entirely its own, built around Baymax, the inflatable healthcare robot that Hiro Hamada inherits from his older brother Tadashi. San Fransokyo gives the film a distinct skyline to hide its superhero mechanics in, but it's the bond between Hiro and Baymax that makes the case for watching it.
The Lion King borrows its shape from Hamlet, right down to a father's ghost appearing to guide his son toward reclaiming a stolen throne. The production has its own dramatic backstory too. The Northridge earthquake struck weeks before release, and animators finished frames at their kitchen tables to make the deadline. None of that strain shows in a film that still holds up as some of Disney's most confident hand drawn work.
Toy Story 4 sends Woody out past Andy's old bedroom and into a life he has to choose for himself. Tim Allen has said he and Tom Hanks could barely keep composed recording their final scenes together, and that emotion is on the screen. It's a quieter, more reflective entry than the previous films, closing out the saga on its own terms.
Toy Story 2 was meant to be a cheaper direct to video sequel before early footage convinced Pixar to rebuild it as a full theatrical feature. That gamble is why Jessie exists at all. Her backstory, set to the song When She Loved Me, was one of the additions that turned a quick follow up into a film people still cite as equal to the original.
Monsters, Inc. very nearly starred a grown man being haunted by monsters only he could see. Pixar swapped that adult for a toddler named Boo and reshaped its lead monster, once a clumsy character called Johnson, into Sulley, and that switch is what makes the friendship at the center of the film work as well as it does.
Start with whichever era you're in the mood for tonight, new records or old favorites, Disney Plus has the whole range covered.
