The best new kids’ movies on Netflix US

Part road-trip comedy, part sci-fi action adventure and every bit hilarious, this hyperkinetic instant-classic from the Into the Spider-verse team – already one of the best animated films of all time – is wall-to-wall delightful. With an all-star voice cast and colorful action, the film – about a family whose cross-country trek is interrupted by a pesky machine uprising – is breathless in its joke-a-minute charm, but its greatest strength is its universal theme of family bonding. 

The Roald Dahl vibes are strong in this oddball animated feature about a group of kids seeking to become orphans to escape their selfish parents. It’s a slightly darker kids’ tale that ultimately reinforces the importance of family, with an all-star cast delivering hilarious lines as the Willoughby children navigate an increasingly big world with the help of a loving nanny and a wacky candy maker. 

The famous paragons of friendship get a new jolt of life courtesy of this lushly animated fable that takes dead aim at teaching kids the importance of overcoming prejudice and bigotry. The film takes in an Equestria fraught with class divides in which friendly Pegasi, unicorns and Earth ponies work together to bring their world together again. Don’t worry: The heavy-handed messaging about tolerance and acceptance comes with gobs of glitter, scores of pop songs and tons of punny jokes. 

An anthology-style horror film for the younger set, Nightbooks concerns a kid trapped in an apartment by a sinister witch (Krysten Ritter), who must be appeased by telling a scary story every night... or be trapped together. There’s nothing super terrifying at play here – think of it as a dark cousin to Goosebumps, Creeped Out and Are Your Afraid of the Dark? – allowing for tweens to indulge in some lite campfire spookiness told with playful aplomb.

A family comedy in the ‘90s mode, this comedy centers on a pair of parents (Jennifer Garner and Édgar Ramírez) who vow to eliminate the word ‘no’ from their vocabulary for one day, much to the delight of their kids. The antics that follow include huge messes and a lot of good-natured fun for the younger set, with a theme of the value of individualism hammered home between the gags. 

Do we need another film set in the world of Sherlock Holmes? Is it weird for Sherlock to take a back seat in it? Is Millie Bobby Brown a movie star? This light-footed caper answers all those questions – yes, no and yes – over two hours of giddying, female-led crime-solving. It’s an action-packed, super-sleuthing rush.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s animated tale of a Cuban girl and her lovable kinkajou’s journey to write a timeless love song is a musical confection unlike anything Netflix has released. The songs are expectedly explosive, but it’s the vividly realized world its characters occupy that puts Vivo in a class of its own. 

Kelly Ferguson thought she was signing up for a simple babysitting gig on Halloween night. Well, it turns out she was recruited into a secret society of babysitters who need to be sheltered from wicked monsters. How's that for a scary Halloween? Now, she just has to figure out how to defeat the Boogeyman known as ‘The Grand Guignol.’

Netflix has made a cottage industry out of its holiday offerings, but nothing it’s released yet has matched this unlikely, gorgeously animated alternate origin story for Jolly Ol’ St Nick. The characters are great, the art is incredible and the message about misfits finding the meaning of Christmas makes it an instant and timeless holiday classic. 

Steeped in East Asian lore, this musical animated tale follows a genius girl as she builds a rocket to the moon in order to prove that a mythological lunar queen is very much real. The colors are visuals are wildly imaginative, the story is tear-jerking and the songs mostly land in this colorful, imaginative tale of loss, friendship and renewal.