Somewhere around 2010, family movies stopped being only for kids. I don't mean the jokes got dirtier or the plots got more complicated, since a five-year-old can still follow every movie on this list without any trouble. I mean the emotional stuff stopped getting softened. Characters actually die and stay dead. Parents and kids actually struggle to understand each other without some neat conversation fixing it in five minutes.
I've cried at more family movies in the last fifteen years than I ever expected to as an adult, and I don't think that's an accident. The six movies on this list all figured out the same trick, they tell a story simple enough for a kid to follow, then sneak in enough real feelings that the parent sitting next to them ends up wiping their eyes in the dark, hoping nobody notices.
6
'How to Train Your Dragon' (2010)
Image via DreamWorks Animation
Toothless never says a single word in this movie, and somehow he's still one of the most expressive characters animation has ever given us. Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) learns a dragon's body language instead the whole time, and by the time he earns Toothless's trust, so have you, mostly through small things like an ear flick or a slow blink that says more than dialogue ever could.
The ending gets me every time though. Hiccup loses part of his leg in the final battle, and the movie doesn't rush to fix that or treat it like a tragedy to move past quickly. He just gets a metal prosthetic and keeps flying, scars and all. It's a small, quiet choice for a kids' movie to make, and it's stuck with me longer than almost anything else on this list.
5
'Toy Story 3' (2010)
Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
There's a scene near the end of this movie where Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen), and the rest of the toys are sliding toward an incinerator with no way out, and instead of fighting it, they just take each other's hands and wait. I was fully grown when I first saw this in theaters, and I remember the whole row of adults around me going quiet at exactly the same moment.
They get saved, obviously, this is still a kids' movie. But that scene tells you something the whole film had been building toward which is that these characters would rather face the end together than apart. The actual ending, where Andy is handing his toys over to Bonnie and playing with them for one last time before college, hits almost as hard, and it's the reason this movie made grown adults cry in a theater built for eight-year-olds.
4
'The Mitchells vs. the Machines' (2021)
Image via Sony Pictures Animation
Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson) doodles constantly, and the movie actually shows you her doodles, scribbled right onto the screen over the regular animation, so you're seeing the world exactly the way her brain processes it. The thing that actually got me so invested was her relationship with her dad, Rick (Danny McBride), where two people who love each other and have no idea how to say it out loud.
The robot uprising plot is fun, genuinely funny in places, but it's really just an excuse to strand this family together to force the conversations they've been avoiding for years. In the end, Rick finally tells Katie he's proud of the weird, specific thing she loves instead of wishing she loved something easier to understand. I was not expecting to feel that much about a movie with a rogue Furby army in it.
3
'Coco' (2017)
Image via Pixar Animation Studios
This movie builds its entire emotional core around one idea. A person doesn't really die until the last living soul who remembers them forgets. Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez) is trying to get home from the Land of the Dead before his own great-great-grandfather, Héctor (Gael García Bernal), fades away completely, and the wait in the film feels almost like what most movies do for a ticking bomb.
The song "Remember Me" shows up twice, once as a cheesy hit performed for applause, and once as a quiet lullaby sung by a father to his daughter before he was ever famous. Hearing that second version again at the end, sung to Coco herself right as she's on the edge of forgetting her own father, is one of the only times I've seen an entire theater audibly crying at an animated movie, myself included.
2
'Paddington 2' (2017)
Image via StudioCanal
A hardened prison cook named Knuckles McGinty (Brendan Gleeson) starts this movie hating the small, polite bear who's just been locked up with him, and ends it baking marmalade sandwiches and running the kitchen with something close to joy. That's the whole trick of this film. Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) doesn't fight anyone or outsmart anyone into being kind. He's just so relentlessly decent that everyone around him, prisoners included, eventually gives up resisting it.
Hugh Grant plays the villain, a washed-up actor named Phoenix Buchanan who steals a pop-up book to chase a hidden fortune, and he's clearly having the time of his life doing it. But the real heart of the film is Paddington visiting his Aunt Lucy in her retirement home, still writing to her every week, still trying to make her proud from thousands of miles away. I didn't expect a movie about a talking bear and a marmalade sandwich to make me tear up twice, and it did it anyway.
1
'The Wild Robot' (2024)
Image via Universal Pictures
Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o) is a robot built to complete tasks efficiently, and the first task she's ever given, by accident, is raising a gosling whose family she crushed without meaning to. Fink the fox (Pedro Pascal) mostly shows up to make jokes and steal eggs, but even he can't stay cynical for long once he watches Roz try, clumsily and completely without instructions, to become something she was never programmed to be: a mother.
The gosling, Brightbill (voiced by Kit Connor), has to learn to fly before winter, and watching Roz train him, failing over and over before either of them figures it out, is the kind of sequence that sneaks up on you. Roz is captured near the end and finds her way back for him anyway, programming be damned, I wasn't thinking about the animation anymore, gorgeous as it is. I was just hoping she'd make it back in time.
Image via DreamWorks Animation
Image via DreamWorks Animation
Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Image via Sony Pictures Animation
Image via Pixar Animation Studios
Image via StudioCanal
Image via Universal Pictures
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