Cartoon Brew Writers Pick Their Favorite Features, Series, And Shorts Of 2025

As 2025 draws to a close and we cast our eyes forward to the new year, we wanted to take one final look back at the year that was in animation.

To that end, we asked some of our regular contributing writers to chime in with their favorite films, series, and shorts that they saw over the past 12 months. Streaming mega-hits, broadcast standouts, and obscure indie gems are all present here. This was an anything-goes process, with no strict rules on what or how the writers could pick. These are simply the titles that we loved from the last 12 months.

Tara Bennett

Feature

K-Pop Demon Hunters:  Directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, and their whole story and animation team, created a genuinely funny, heartfelt, and contemporary film that brought the depth of Korean culture to life. The songs are infectious, yes, but the overall design choice to use 2D aesthetics with three-dimensional language sets the film apart in a special way. Weaving ancient Korean cultural motifs into modern-day Korea, and its core characters, is brilliant and multi-layered. It was the big surprise of the year for me (and seemingly, the rest of the world too!)

Series

Common Side Effects: Adult Swim quietly released one of the best thrillers of the year with Common Side Effects. Creators Joe Bennett and Steve Hely’s first collaboration together engaged their best storytelling instincts, and the result is this paranoid, conspiracy theory thriller with big ideas, humor, and crackling tension. Bennett’s character design aesthetic is odd and as slightly off-putting as every character in this story is, which is brilliant. It’s grounded, yet surreal, and is as absorbing as a Vince Gilligan show.

Short

Cafuné: In a year of some amazing shorts, it was a very hard pick, but Cafuné moved me. The animation choices are not only beautiful and haunting, but the piece also makes the hot-button topic of immigration personal. All great art gives a disengaged or biased viewer the opportunity to see and feel through new eyes. This short does that and creates a visual bridge towards empathy and compassion. Powerful.

Kambole Campbell

Feature

The Last Blossom: Awards season and end-of-year roundups rarely give anime films their flowers, and yet end-of-year lists are flush with films indebted to anime — specifically the likes of Arco and Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, which pay homage to the work of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Yes, it’s a cliché to just point at any mildly contemplative animation and say, “It’s just like Ghibli!” but those three guys in Arco are basically the pirates from Laputa. Speaking of which, I’m going to pick a film that also evokes the spirit of ’80s anime through some of its aesthetic choices, but more than that, it’s just an incredibly thoughtful and mature drama. That would be Baku Kinoshita’s feature debut, The Last Blossom, which tells of a yakuza dying in prison, searching his soul through conversation with a talking “touch-me-not” flower. I love Kinoshita’s mix of stylised character design with gentle acting, how the film balances its good nature with the harsh and imbalanced consequences of the real world and its greed. Also fantastic: Kenji Iwaisawa’s 100 Meters.

Series

Common Side Effects: With regards to television, 2025 might have peaked early for me with Common Side Effects, the comedic conspiracy thriller from co-creators Joe Bennett and Steve Hely. Hely’s satirical chops from his time on Veep and Bennett’s fondness for surreal grotesquery from his and animation producer Green Street Pictures’ work on Scavengers Reign are a perfect combination. It’s remarkable how well it fits together all of its different story threads in 20-minute bursts — from the idealist Marshall Cuso’s quest to subvert the capitalist greed of U.S. healthcare, to the charismatic DEA agents Copano and Harrington who quickly realise their services are being bought, to the absurdity of Frances and her gormless boss Rick (voiced by Mike Judge, by the way).

And, of course, it’s stunning. There’s a smart synthesis of “ugly” character designs associated with other adult animated comedies (bobble-headed people with very small faces, vaguely reminiscent of Pants) with lifelike movement. But it also factors in the hallucinatory wonder appropriate for a show about mushrooms. I initially lowballed my season review for the first five episodes shown, as I knew it could get better — and it absolutely did.

Short

Niccolo: Honestly, beyond anthology work, I’ve not been a great student of animated shorts this year, aside from catching a few older experimental works from the Polish directors Daniel Szczechura and Zbigniew Rybczyński. But, as they do every year, the Gobelins graduation films have been a joy to behold. My favourite of the group this year was probably Niccolo, a dreamlike odyssey through the life of the composer and violinist Niccolò Paganini. The directorial team — Clémentine Di Prizio, David Florian, Axelle Granet, Sirui Lius, Hugo Michalet, and Njolai Pachomius — does not directly explain his story, rather attempting to map the emotion of it through visual expressivity. The tempting climb to fame, the smothering nature of becoming a product for the wealthy, attempts to reclaim some form of grace — all told with captivating grandeur.

Joe Fordham

Feature

For my favorite animated feature of 2025, I can’t pick one. Julian Glander’s Blender-animated Boys Go To Jupiter, which I had the pleasure of covering in August, was charming, droll, and wonderful. But there were so many wild and astonishing films, like A Magnificent Life, the new animated feature by Sylvain Chomet; the extraordinary multimedia fantasia Olivia & The Clouds from Dominican Republic director Tomás Pichardo Espaillat; the funny autobiographical animated documentary Endless Cookie by Seth and Peter Scriver; and the fascinating digitally animated film about filmmaking All Operators Are Currently Unavailable from Croatian animator Dalibor Barić. Those are a handful of animated features that caught my eye this year.

Series

Love, Death + Robots: From the animated TV series that I saw in 2025, I found the Adult Swim medical industry satire Common Side Effects to be lovely, sad, and amusing. But the series that continues to impress me, for its diversity of styles and breadth of imagination, and its general subject matter, is Netflix animated anthology Love, Death + Robots, which this year had a typically eclectic fourth season, including an epic animated Red Hot Chili Peppers performance directed by David Fincher in the style of Gerry Anderson Supermarionation.

Short

The Night Boots: My favorite animated short of 2025 was hard to pick, as there’s such a rich field of work — stop-motion, hybrid CG miracles, hand-painted oil renderings. I remain very fond of Gabriel Schemoul’s charming snow-themed Blender fairytale The Eclipse that I covered for Amid in February; but I’m going with The Night Boots, directed by Pierre-Luc Granjon, as it was so haunting in its monochrome pin-screen renderings and its beautiful low-key performances.

Kévin Giraud

Feature

Ne Zha 2: 2025 was a year of epic animated stories and both critical and box office successes. But in terms of scale, none managed to top the grand visual spectacle that is Ne Zha 2. A gigantic animated production that not only topped the global box office but also redefined the scale of modern 3D animation. With epic showdowns, captivating action, and colossal battles that make Lord of the Rings look like kindergarten fights, Ne Zha 2 is set to become a cult animated classic, way beyond Chinese borders.

Short

On Weary Wings Go By: On the other end of the animated spectrum, Anu-Laura Tuttelberg’s short On Weary Wings Go By is a very quiet, slow-paced wonder. Using porcelain puppets to create mesmerizing stop-motion on a real-life battered Nordic seashore, Tuttelberg crafts a wintry poem about nature, fragility, and the beauty of little details. A film best discovered on a big screen, it engulfs its viewer in a deep, sensorial experience and remains with you long after the lights are turned back on.

Series

Splinter Cell: Deathwatch: Another 2025 piece of art that would definitely benefit from big-screen viewing is Netflix and Ubisoft’s TV series Splinter Cell: Deathwatch, although it’s very unlikely you’ll have this chance. Still, the video game sequel helmed by Guillaume Dousse and Derek Kolstad (backed by French studio Fost and Danish studio Sun Creature, along with Netflix and Ubisoft) is a riveting action piece, skillfully woven and beautifully animated in a brutal, realistic style. By sticking to this raw realism, Deathwatch creates a techno-thriller rooted both in the game’s legacy and in modern times.

Jamie Lang

Feature

Boys Go to Jupiter isn’t just my favorite animated feature of the year, it’s my favorite since Keji Iwaisawa blew my mind in 2019 with On-Gaku: Our Sound. Both share a kindred spirit, I think, in their musical roots and punk rock rebellion against conformity. While On-Gaku stems from the hyper-successful world of anime, yet looks unlike anything else from that medium, Glander’s BGTJ goes somewhere that mainstream CG would never dare, although that’s hardly a surprise given his oeuvre of experimental short films.

Built from the ground up by Glander, including its amazing soundtrack, Boys Go to Jupiter is funny, smart, and, at least for me, brutally nostalgic. The CG animation is sharp, pleasantly lit and colored, and holds up surprisingly well over the film’s 90-minute runtime, given its minimalist Playmobil aesthetic. This isn’t a film for everyone, but it’s one that I’ve happily watched three times over the past year, and will likely watch again soon.

Series

Knights of Guinevere: My current obsession is the emergence of independent, digital-first animation as a real force within the wider animation industry. I’m far more interested in upcoming YouTube premieres than I am in whatever is next from the major streamers, so Knights of Guinevere from The Owl House creator Dana Terrace hit me like a shot of adrenaline. Terrace obviously benefits from having made her name at Disney, but this pilot exists outside that gilded pipeline. In fact, she recently told me that one of the most rewarding parts of making the episode was building a production pipeline from the ground up with Glitch Productions.

The pilot features eye-catching, often nostalgic 2D animation, but it’s Terrace’s storytelling that really won me over. Her instincts, sharpened on shows like Gravity Falls and DuckTales, then fully realized when she showran The Owl House, are on full display here. Knights of Guinevere is tightly paced, logically constructed from start to finish, and packed with recognizable sci-fi influences that never become derivative. It feels confident, clear, and purpose-built, and has me itching to see more.

Short

Hurikán: This short is the most fun I had watching anything all year. Right from the start, it pulls you in with a clear visual language that’s funny, dramatic, and a little over-the-top, but always intentional. The exaggerated hero-style introduction tells you exactly what kind of film this is going to be, while still leaving room for surprises, of which there are plenty. The decision to use black-and-white, hand-drawn animation gives Prague a gritty, grounded feel that matches the relatable narrative of a hopeless and hapless romantic who will go to extreme lengths to impress a sexy bartender. Special mention to The Quinta’s Ghost, which is the most technically impressive short I saw this year and features a narrative after my own heart, but many of the artists who worked on it are some of my closest friends, so I disqualified it from contention here.

Rafael Motamayor

Series

Common Side Effects: Ever since the first teaser for Common Side Effects was released and we were introduced to DEA agent duo Copano and Harrington dancing along to Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora), it was clear this would be a special cartoon. Boasting a creative team that includes Scavengers Reign creator Joe Bennett as well as Mike Judge and Greg Daniels, this is an animated show filled with imagination, absurdist humor, gorgeous animation, and a poignant and thrilling story.

The show follows two high school classmates who reconnect years later after one of them discovers a mushroom capable of curing any and all illnesses, which, of course, triggers a nationwide manhunt from every government agency and Big Pharma company hellbent on protecting their earnings. As a conspiracy thriller, the show is engrossing and unpredictable, with an emphasis on character drama that makes the story stand out from the American adult animation landscape. As an animated show, it is full of stunning visuals and subtle character acting that make the characters come to life. This is a show full of twists and turns, laugh-out-loud moments, and some of the best animation in American television. Simply put, an animated TV event worth watching.

Feature

100 Meters: Director Kenji Iwaisawa already wowed audiences with his stunning indie fil. On-Gaku: Our Sound, but he reaches new heights with his adaptation of Uoto’s Manga 100 Meters. This is the story of the rivalry between two men from their time in middle school to adulthood as they become track racers and experience thrills, trials, and plenty of tribulation. This is a movie about what drives people to become athletes, and what it takes to be the best.

Sports stories hit differently in animation, when the artists are allowed to meticulously hone and interpret movements and feelings in a way that live-action can’t. The way 100 Meters visualizes the feeling of going faster than any human, of having everything around you disappear as you focus on the goal ahead, as adrenaline rushes through your body, is simply stunning. The visuals play around with reality itself, shifting perspectives and art styles to convey the freeing sensation the characters experience when running. Much like The First Slam Dunk, this is as much an entertaining movie as it is an exhilarating sporting event

Chris Robinson

Feature

Endless Cookie: Seth & Peter Scriver: This sensory, swirling animated documentary blends family portraiture, magic-realist journeying, and a clear-eyed critique of Canada’s ongoing mistreatment of Indigenous people. More than a documentary, Endless Cookie becomes an act of remembering and reconnecting. It also pushes back against saccharine mainstream notions of what a “normal” family looks like, showing instead that most are messy, inconsistent, and ever-shifting. Where there is love, protection, loyalty, and openness, there is a family — even if it looks unconventional from the outside.

Series

Eggland: Conner O’Malley, Brendan O’Hare, and Cole Kush – Not sure if it will grow into a full series, but this pilot is a welcome break from the familiar visual language of recent episodic animation. Its subtly live-action feel deepens the uncanny drift of late life, and it’s a relief to see a work centered on a generation so rarely foregrounded in animation — outside of Up, there aren’t many.

With its striking, restrained design and deliberately languid tempo, it captures a community in quiet decline: days blur, time slips, and the world starts to resemble a waiting room for the afterlife.

Short

A Taste of Beer: Xie Li (China): After 35 years of watching shorts, it’s rare that anything truly surprises me, but Xie Li’s utterly fresh, head-scratching spin on a simple premise did exactly that. A son comes home to tell his father that his school football team has won; the father’s unhinged, over-the-top reaction turns this tiny domestic moment into a micro family melodrama/tragedy. Set against a minimalist, abstract landscape with boldly distilled character designs, the film is really damn funny, quietly heartbreaking, and capped by an utterly dark ending. An off-the-beaten-path gem you won’t see on Oscar lists, this bizarro father–son tale has lodged itself in my brain far more than many of the year’s higher-profile shorts.