Best Animated Feature Films Based on TV Shows
- 16 hours ago
- 7 min read
I love cartoons. I always have. Animated movies, animated TV shows, Saturday morning cartoons, late-night cartoons, prime-time cartoons, streaming cartoons, weird underground cartoons that ran once at three in the morning and then vanished forever. I’m all in.
Animation has always been one of my favorite storytelling mediums because it can literally do anything. No limits. No gravity. No rules. If you can draw it, you can show it. And when it’s done right, it can be smarter, darker, funnier, more emotional, and more inventive than most live-action movies could ever dream of being.
Now, taking an animated TV show and turning it into a full-length feature film that actually plays in a movie theater? That’s a tricky proposition. That’s walking a tightrope with no net. Because some shows are meant to live on television. They’re designed for short bursts.
Eleven minutes. Twenty-two minutes. A quick joke, a fast story, a reset button at the end. Stretch that into ninety minutes and suddenly the weaknesses start showing. The rhythm is off. The jokes get thin. The story feels padded. And sometimes you realize, yeah, this should’ve stayed on the small screen.
But then… sometimes it works. Sometimes it really works. Sometimes it’s surprising how great these feature-length adaptations can be.
When the filmmakers actually understand what made the show work in the first place, when they respect the characters, when they upgrade the animation, spend some money, sharpen the writing, and take advantage of the big screen instead of just dumping an extended TV episode into a theater, magic can happen.
And that’s why I put this list together. These are my ten favorite animated feature films that were based on actual animated TV series and were released theatrically. These are the ones that made the leap and stuck the landing.
I don’t even know if people still do Saturday morning cartoons anymore. Do they? Is that still a thing? I honestly don’t know. When I was a kid, that was sacred time. You’d get up early, pour yourself several bowls of cereal, plant yourself in front of the TV, and just disappear into animation for hours.
Superheroes, slapstick, sci-fi, talking animals, bad morals tacked on at the end, wild colors, insane sound effects, and jokes that went right over your head until you rewatched them years later and went, wait a minute, what did they just say? Those mornings shaped an entire generation of movie lovers.
Animated television has always been a favorite, and it’s evolved massively over the years. It’s not just kids’ stuff anymore, and honestly, it hasn’t been for a long time.
We’ve had animated prime-time series, adult animation, experimental animation, and shows that push storytelling in ways live-action TV can’t or won’t. At this point, animated TV is just as legitimate as live-action TV, and in many cases, it’s better.
Some of the most critically acclaimed television of the past twenty years has been animated. Shows like BoJack Horseman, Bob’s Burgers, F Is for Family, The Simpsons, South Park, Rick and Morty, Archer, Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, and a ton of others have proven that animation can be personal, political, surreal, heartbreaking, and flat-out brilliant.
And because animation has been such a massive part of television history, it was inevitable that studios would keep turning these shows into movies. There are a lot of them. I mean a lot.
The Dragon Ball Z movies alone could fill a calendar. Yu-Gi-Oh, My Little Pony, Heathcliff, The Smurfs, He-Man, Digimon, Cowboy Bebop, Tom and Jerry, The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Care Bears, Pokémon, Gumby, Yogi Bear, DuckTales, The Wild Thornberrys, Rugrats.
They’ve all been dragged onto the big screen at one point or another. Sometimes multiple times. Sometimes wisely. Sometimes very, very unwisely.
And let’s be honest. A lot of these movies aren’t good. A lot of them are kind of bad. Some of them are real stinkers. Cheap knockoffs. Cash grabs. Movies that feel rushed, slapped together, poorly animated, lazily written, and designed solely to separate parents from their money for ninety excruciating minutes.
The animation is often subpar. The voice work is off. The humor is watered down. The spirit of the original show is nowhere to be found. You walk out thinking, why did this exist?
The reason I started thinking about all of this again is because there’s a new SpongeBob SquarePants movie, and it’s actually very funny and quite good. And that’s the thing. The SpongeBob movies are kind of the exception.
Most of them work. They understand the show. They embrace the insanity. They improve the animation. They lean into the weirdness instead of sanding it down. And that got me thinking about all the other animated TV-to-movie adaptations that actually got it right.
The ten films that follow are the best animated feature films made for the big screen that are based on animated TV series. I’ve ranked them in order of my personal preference, because that’s how I do things.
Every single one of these movies improves upon the TV show it came from, whether it’s through better animation, smarter writing, stronger storytelling, or all of the above.
In some cases, the animation is spectacular because they finally had the budget to make it look the way it always should have. In other cases, the movies are so strong they stand alone as great animated films, even if you’ve never seen a single episode of the series.
So here we go. These are the ten best animated feature films based on animated TV shows, ranked in order of preference. This is my list. Your mileage may vary. And that’s the fun of it.
THE 10 BEST ANIMATED FEATURES BASED ON TV SHOWS (in order of preference):
This is still the gold standard. The movie that proved you could take a foul-mouthed, crudely animated, insanely offensive TV show and turn it into a full-blown, politically sharp, Broadway-style musical that somehow still feels dangerous.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone didn’t just expand South Park, they weaponized it. The songs are legitimately great, the satire cuts deep in every direction, and the movie feels bigger, angrier, smarter, and more ambitious than the show had any right to be at that point. It’s fearless, hilarious, and still shockingly relevant. This one didn’t just justify its existence, it raised the bar for every animated TV movie that followed.
This movie shouldn’t work. On paper, it sounds like ninety minutes of two idiots laughing at fart jokes, and yet it absolutely works because Mike Judge understood these characters perfectly.
The road-movie structure is genius, the animation is sharper, and the satire is actually pretty sly beneath all the grunting and giggling. Beavis and Butt-Head remain completely themselves while the world around them goes increasingly insane, and that contrast is where the comedy really lands. It’s dumb on purpose, smart by accident, and endlessly rewatchable.
This one is way better than it ever gets credit for. Craig McCracken took a bright, funny, deceptively emotional TV show and gave it real cinematic scope without losing the charm or the energy.
The animation pops, the action is bigger, and the origin story actually adds depth to Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup instead of just padding things out. It’s sweet, funny, occasionally dark, and genuinely moving in spots. This is how you expand a TV concept without betraying it.
The title alone tells you exactly what kind of movie this is. Gloriously stupid, aggressively weird, and completely uninterested in making sense. And that’s why it works. Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro didn’t try to “fix” Aqua Teen Hunger Force for the big screen.
They doubled down on the nonsense. The animation is slightly upgraded, the jokes are relentless, and the movie feels like an inside joke that somehow got a theatrical release. If you love the show, this thing is pure joy. If you don’t, it’s probably torture. I love it.
This is one of those rare cases where a beloved TV series turns into a movie and somehow becomes even more delightful. Nick Park and Aardman nailed the transition.
The stop-motion animation is exquisite, the humor is clever and gentle, and the monster-movie parody angle is inspired. Wallace and Gromit feel completely at home on the big screen, and the film has a warmth and craftsmanship that’s impossible to resist. It’s charming, inventive, and just flat-out wonderful.
This movie understands its characters, and that’s everything. It doesn’t try to reinvent Bob’s Burgers or turn it into something louder or more frantic. It simply gives the Belchers a slightly bigger story, a slightly bigger canvas, and a couple of genuinely catchy musical numbers.
The animation looks great, the humor is character-based, and the heart is exactly where it should be. It feels like a love letter to longtime fans while still being accessible to newcomers.
It took them long enough, but when The Simpsons finally hit the big screen, it mostly delivered. The animation upgrade alone was worth the price of admission, and there are some genuinely great sequences and jokes throughout.
Not everything lands, and it doesn’t quite reach the heights of the show at its absolute peak, but it feels like a proper event. Seeing Springfield blown up to theatrical proportions was a blast, and when it works, it really works.
This movie is way smarter than it pretends to be. Beneath the bright colors and nonstop jokes is a surprisingly sharp satire of superhero movies, reboots, and cinematic universes.
It pokes fun at everything, including itself, and somehow manages to be both obnoxious and endearing at the same time. The musical numbers are catchy, the humor is fast and absurd, and the movie knows exactly when to get sincere without overstaying its welcome.
This one still feels special. Dark, moody, emotional, and genuinely adult in its storytelling, even though it came from a TV show aimed at kids. The animation is gorgeous, the score is fantastic, and the story digs deep into Bruce Wayne’s psychology in a way most live-action movies still struggle to do.
It treats Batman like a tragic figure, not just a superhero, and that seriousness pays off. This is a real movie, not just an extended episode.
The movie that proved SpongeBob could survive outside the TV. It’s manic, surreal, relentlessly funny, and completely unafraid to get weird. The animation is sharper, the jokes come at machine-gun speed, and the story actually has stakes without losing the show’s anarchic spirit.
Like the best SpongeBob episodes, it’s smart, stupid, and oddly heartfelt all at once. A perfect example of how to blow up a TV cartoon for the big screen without losing what made it special in the first place.
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