Pixar's "Hoppers" and "Toy Story 5" top 2026's animated field on critic and audience scores alike, while DreamWorks' "Forgotten Island" earns the year's best reviews without matching that reception at the box office. The right pick for a given reader depends on whether they're chasing critical consensus, a reliable family watch, or simply the biggest opening weekend of the year. Review aggregates and audience scores moved throughout 2026 as more critics weighed in, so the rankings below reflect the clearest patterns in the data rather than a single frozen leaderboard. Each film below is sorted by what the evidence shows about critical reception, audience reaction, and box office performance — three measures that, this year, often point in different directions.
Table of Contents
- Which 2026 animated films have the strongest reviews?
- Where critics and audiences disagree
- Why a well-reviewed film can still underperform in theaters
- Matching a film to what a reader actually wants
- A caution about treating any single score as final
Which 2026 animated films have the strongest reviews?
Four films anchor the top of the critical rankings. Pixar's "Hoppers" opened at No. 1 domestically in March with roughly $46 million domestic and $88 million worldwide — the biggest opening weekend for an original animated film since "Coco" in 2017 — while holding a 94% Rotten Tomatoes critics' score matched by a 94% audience score and an A CinemaScore, according to News4Jax's coverage of the opening weekend. That combination of a strong critics' score, an equally strong audience score, and a top-tier opening weekend is rare; most films on this list hit one of those marks, not all three.
Pixar's "Toy Story 5" came close behind it. Ahead of its June opening, the film carried a 94% certified-fresh Tomatometer score and a 93% audience score, with critics' consensus holding that the fifth entry largely avoids the franchise fatigue that sequels this deep into a series usually show, as reported by the Washington Times. DreamWorks' "Forgotten Island," released September 25 and distributed by Universal, posted the year's highest aggregate scores: a 95% critics' score and a 96% audience score, making it one of 2026's best-reviewed animated films by that measure, per SlashFilm's reporting. Netflix's stop-motion "I Am Frankelda" rounds out the top tier with a 100% critics' score from 24 reviews, though The Wrap and Variety both note the story lags behind the film's visuals.
Where critics and audiences disagree
Not every 2026 release reads the same way to critics and to the people who actually watch it. Netflix and Skydance's "Swapped" shows the widest gap: a 66% critics' score from 44 reviews against an 88% audience score from more than 250 ratings. Critics call the body-swap plot generic while praising the animation's visual polish, according to Rotten Tomatoes' aggregate page for the film.
That gap didn't stop viewers from showing up — WatchMojo reports "Swapped" drew 38.7 million views in its first week on Netflix, a platform record, even as professional critics rated it only middling. "The Super Mario Galaxy Movie" moves in the opposite direction from "Hoppers": it opened April 1 at 44% on Rotten Tomatoes, well below the original "Super Mario Bros. Movie," with The Times and The Guardian both giving it their lowest star ratings and citing heavy reliance on franchise Easter eggs over character development, per Nintendo Life's review roundup. A reader weighing that film should expect a nostalgia-driven watch rather than a strong standalone story.
Why a well-reviewed film can still underperform in theaters
"Forgotten Island" is the clearest example of acclaim not converting to turnout in 2026. Despite its 95% critics' score, the film opened to only about $12.8 million domestically and $20.6 million worldwide against an $80 million budget — one of DreamWorks Animation's five lowest openings on record, according to TheWrap's analysis of the box office shortfall.
That mismatch matters for anyone using review scores as a stand-in for popularity: a high Tomatometer number says a film is well-made, not that audiences found it or showed up for it in theaters. "Hoppers" is the inverse case — a film that combined high reviews with a record-setting opening weekend — which makes it the safer bet for a reader who wants both critical quality and evidence that a wide audience already responded to it.
Matching a film to what a reader actually wants
Not every reader is optimizing for the same thing, so the ranking looks different depending on the goal: A reader choosing based on audience reaction rather than critics should weight "Swapped" higher than its critics' score suggests, since its 88% audience score and record Netflix viewership point to broad appeal that reviewers didn't fully credit.
- Strongest all-around pick: "Hoppers" — high critics' and audience scores plus the year's biggest animated opening.
- Best for an established franchise fan: "Toy Story 5," given its 94% critics' score and consensus that it avoids sequel fatigue.
- Best visuals over story: "I Am Frankelda" or "Swapped" — both praised for craft even where critics found the narrative thinner.
- Best if visual craft and reviews matter more than theatrical box office: "Forgotten Island," whose reception is strong despite its weak opening.
- Skip unless nostalgia is the draw: "The Super Mario Galaxy Movie," at 44% on Rotten Tomatoes.
A caution about treating any single score as final
Aggregate scores for 2026 releases shifted as more reviews came in — "Toy Story 5" was reported anywhere from 91% to 94% within the same week, and "I Am Frankelda"'s critics' score moved as its review count grew from 11 to 24 — so any percentage cited here is a snapshot rather than a settled figure, per Laughing Place's tracking of the Toy Story 5 score. A reader checking a score close to a film's release date should expect it to firm up, not necessarily to hold exactly where it started.