Somewhere around 2010, family movies stopped being just for kids. Not that the humor got raunchier or the plots more convoluted—a five-year-old can still follow every film on this list without trouble. What changed is that the emotional beats stopped being softened. Characters die and stay dead. Parents and kids struggle to understand each other without a tidy five-minute conversation fixing everything.
I've cried at more family movies in the last fifteen years than I ever expected as an adult, and I don't think that's a coincidence. These six films all figured out the same trick: tell a story simple enough for a child to grasp, then sneak in enough genuine feeling that the parent beside them ends up wiping their eyes in the dark, hoping nobody notices.
6. 'How to Train Your Dragon' (2010)
Toothless never speaks a single word, yet he's one of the most expressive characters animation has ever given us. Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) learns to read a dragon's body language, and by the time he earns Toothless's trust, so have you—through small details like an ear flick or a slow blink that say more than dialogue ever could.
The ending gets me every time. Hiccup loses part of his leg in the final battle, and the movie doesn't rush to fix it or treat it as 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, and it's stuck with me longer than almost anything else on this list.
5. 'Toy Story 3' (2010)
There's a scene near the end where Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen), and the rest of the toys slide toward an incinerator with no way out, and instead of fighting it, they 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: these characters would rather face the end together than apart. The actual ending, where Andy hands his toys over to Bonnie and plays with them one last time before college, hits almost as hard. 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)
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 see the world exactly the way her brain processes it. What really got me invested was her relationship with her dad, Rick (Danny McBride)—two people who love each other but have no idea how to say it out loud.
The robot uprising plot is fun and genuinely funny, but it's really just an excuse to strand this family together and 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)
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. 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)
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)
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 consistently, to be a mother.
The film is a visual stunner, with lush, painterly animation that feels like a nature documentary crossed with a sci-fi epic. But what makes it the best family movie since 2010 is how it handles themes of parenthood, loss, and found family. Roz learns that being a parent isn't about efficiency—it's about showing up, making mistakes, and loving fiercely. The ending, which I won't spoil, is a gut punch that redefines what a robot can feel. If you haven't seen it yet, it's a must-watch for any family movie night.
These six films—from the best movies since 2015 to timeless classics—prove that family entertainment can be both wildly entertaining and deeply moving. Whether you're revisiting them or discovering them for the first time, they're guaranteed to leave you with a lump in your throat and a warm heart.
