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The 2010s gave animation some of its boldest and most beautiful films, many of which remain heralded today as among the best of the century so far. However, at the same time, there are several movies released in that decade that are not spoken of as much today, and some were completely overlooked when they were released. Some of the titles were praised at the time, but others were overlooked or have been forgotten by the sands of time.
The best animated movies each year of the 2010s have a strong mix of releases that people still love to this day. How to Train Your Dragon helped elevate DreamWorks in a way that no other movie before had. Wreck-It Ralph showed that Disney was more than just princesses, and it helped the studio match the oncoming rivals in animation. Inside Out remains one of the best Pixar movies ever made, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse changed how animated studios make their movies.
However, there were several other movies that should have been huge, but for some reason, audiences either ignored them or forgot them when the next big thing came along. Coco was a great movie, but there was another animated movie about the Day of the Dead that is just as good. Fans love Wallace and Gromit, but mostly ignored Aardman's 2012 release. A superhero movie won an Oscar in 2014, but Spider-Man is all anyone talks about today. These animated movies deserve more love.
The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012)
In 2005, Aardman Studios won an Oscar for one of the best stop-motion animated movies ever made. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was an instant success, and it remains one of the best animated releases of the 21st century. It seemed like Aardman was finally getting the recognition the company deserved, but it seems that only Wallace and Gromit, and on a smaller level, Shaun the Sheep, are all American fans talk about.
In 2012, the studio made an animated pirate movie called The Pirates! Band of Misfits, and it was better than most people remember. Hugh Grant voices the hapless Pirate Captain as he goes on a bumbling quest to win Pirate of the Year. This also allowed him the chance to meet Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria in a fun romp. It earned an Oscar nomination and had a modest box office total, but it is a movie no one seems to remember today.
The Peanuts Movie (2015)
There might not be a more popular and successful comic strip than Peanuts over the years. However, when Blue Sky Studios tried to bring Charlie Brown and the gang back for a new movie in 2015, it mostly came and went from theaters and has now become forgotten. One of the problems with the new movie is that it was a fully CGI take on the cartoon strip, and that just didn't seem to look or feel right compared to the beloved cartoons of the past.
However, if viewers can get past the CGI look of the characters, it is a great story. Charles Schulz's son and grandson, Craig and Bryan, wrote the script, so it was kept in the family, and it follows Charlie Brown's efforts to win over the Little Red-Haired Girl, alongside Snoopy’s Red Baron flying-ace fantasy. It was a huge box office success, but its sweet tone and lack of modern cynicism made it a quiet film that has slipped from the public consciousness.
Big Hero 6 (2014)
It seems like everyone loves Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. However, that Sony movie wasn't the first Marvel animated release of the 2010s, and it wasn't even the first to get Oscar attention. In 2014, Disney released Big Hero 6, and while it didn't use Marvel's name in advertising at all, it is based on a Marvel Comics property of the same name. The film follows Hiro Hamada as he forms a team of young inventors to become the movie's titular superhero team.
This film was a huge success, making $657.8 million at the box office and winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. It never got a movie sequel, and it has mostly been forgotten thanks to the hype around the Spider-Verse movies. However, it is a great movie and one of the best superhero animated feature films ever released into theaters.
Rise Of The Guardians (2012)
Rise of the Guardians is a DreamWorks movie that is based on William Joyce's Guardians of Childhood books. It remains one of the most beautifully animated films that DreamWorks made in the 2010s, yet it was seen as a disappointment for the studio. Why it failed remains puzzling. On top of the incredible animation, it has a great story, as Jack Frost discovers he is fated to join the legendary Guardians to protect children and spread holiday cheer.
With fantastic portrayals of the Easter Bunny (an Australian-accented Hugh Jackman), Santa Claus (a brilliant Alec Baldwin), a spunky Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher), and the silent Sandman, this is a movie that should be on replay every Christmas, and probably on Easter as well. However, it was considered a box office failure, even with a solid worldwide box office take, and fans just forgot about it and moved on.
Rango (2011)
Rango was unlike almost any animated movie released when it hit theaters in 2011. Directed by Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean), the movie follows a pet chameleon named Rango (Johnny Depp), who gets lost and becomes the sheriff of a desert town. This was the first movie animated by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), and it looked incredible and unlike any other movie released that year.
The film had photoreal, textured ILM animation that split off from the polished-looking movies from Pixar and DreamWorks, and it helped the movie stand out. It was also a brilliant homage to classic Westerns, and it has as much humor for adults as it does for kids. Rango won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, but most kids today have likely never heard of, much less seen, the film.
Klaus (2019)
Klaus is a movie that should be on everyone's Christmas watch list, but it has instead become an obscure movie that few people ever mention around the holidays. The big reason that the movie slipped by, unnoticed by most fans, is that it was a Netflix original release in 2019, and it has since become buried in the algorithm of the streaming giant.
Klaus is a Santa Claus origin story that follows a selfish postman posted to a bleak northern town who befriends a reclusive toymaker named Klaus. Together, they slowly begin to find the joy and meaning of Christmas, and Santa Claus begins his life's work. Jason Schwartzman stars as the postman and J.K. Simmons is Klaus. Despite its obscure nature, it was the first Netflix animated movie nominated for an Oscar.
The Book Of Life (2014)
Coco was one of Pixar's best movies of the 2010s, a musical that has a strong connection to Mexico's Day of the Dead celebration. However, Coco's success helped to bury a rival movie with similar themes that came out three years earlier, called The Book of Life. This movie was produced by Guillermo del Toro and directed by Jorge R. Gutierrez in his feature-length debut. It stars Diego Luna as Manolo, a bullfighter who dreams of being a musician.
The rest of the voice cast is up to the task, as Zoe Saldaña, Channing Tatum, Ice Cube, and Ron Perlman are all part of the film. The story is built around the Mexican Day of the Dead, following Manolo across colorful realms of the afterlife. It also has an incredibly unique animation style, with the characters designed like carved wooden figures, giving it a folk-art texture unlike any other studio film.
Missing Link (2019)
Laika has a strong reputation for stop-motion movies, including the brilliant Kubo and the Two Strings, which remains the best animated movie released in the 2010s. However, not all the movies from the studio have achieved the same level of critical and commercial success, and Missing Link is a movie that ended up as a box office bomb for the otherwise successful animation studio.
The plot follows Mr. Link (Zach Galifianakis), a large talking Sasquatch who, with the help of British explorers Sir Lionel Frost (Hugh Jackman) and Adelina Fortnight (Zoe Saldaña), travels to the Himalayas to meet his Yeti cousins. The stop-motion animated film had a $100 million budget, but it only made $26.6 million. Despite this, it earned an Oscar nomination and was the first non-CGI stop-motion animated movie to win a Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film.
Abominable (2019)
Released in 2019, Abominable is a movie about a Shanghai teenager named Yi (Chloe Bennet), who finds a young Yeti on her rooftop, names him Everest (Joseph Izzo), and sets out to reunite him with his family on Mount Everest. The movie is from DreamWorks, and it was directed by Jill Culton, who was previously the first female director to make a feature-length animated movie for a major studio with Open Season.
With a $75 million budget, the movie finished with a $188 million box office take. The movie remains one that people need to respect, as its emotional core deals with grief as Yi processes the loss of her father through the journey. Add in a Chinese setting and largely Asian-led cast, and this is a Western studio animated movie that deserves much more love.
Megamind (2010)
Megamind was a movie that was dismissed by a lot of critics solely for its casting choices, and those critics failed to recognize what was a fantastic animated release to kick off the decade. DreamWorks Animation released this superhero movie, with Will Ferrell voicing a blue-skinned supervillain, Megamind, who, interestingly enough, was the protagonist of the film. Meanwhile, Brad Pitt voices the "heroic" Metro Man.
The plot follows Megamind after he defeats his nemesis, Metro Man, and then creates a replacement hero, Tighten, who turns evil and forces Megamind to become the good guy. It was a box office success, although most people forgot about it quickly since Illumination had arrived three months earlier with Despicable Me, and that movie overshadowed Megamind in every conceivable way. However, it did gain a cult following, which led to a streaming sequel 14 years later.
