Apple TV+ launched in November 2019 with no back catalog at all — no licensed library, no decades of acquired film rights, just a handful of originals and a great deal of money.
That founding constraint still shapes its animation shelf today. There is no deep bench of licensed Pixar or Ghibli titles padding the numbers, which means every animated film on the service is there because Apple made it or bought it outright.
Apple TV+ has a small animated library with an unusually high hit rate. Wolfwalkers is the best title on the service, followed by the Oscar-winning short The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.
What follows is ranked best to worst, with features and shorts together, because on a library this size separating them would leave two lists of three. If you are used to scrolling a thousand titles in our roundup of comedy movies on Netflix, the scale here will surprise you.
Why The Apple TV+ Animation Library Is So Small
Netflix, Max, and Prime Video built their catalogs the way cable did — by licensing enormous volumes of existing content and topping it with originals. Apple inverted that, spending on a narrow slate of prestige productions and betting on awards attention rather than raw title count.
For animation specifically, that meant partnering with studios that already carried critical credibility. Cartoon Saloon, the Irish studio behind The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, delivered Wolfwalkers; Skydance Animation, run by former Pixar and Disney chief John Lasseter, signed a multi-year deal that produced Luck and the short Blush.
Apple TV+ launched without a back catalog, so its animation comes from originals and acquisitions rather than licensing. That means far fewer titles overall and a much higher share of award contenders.
The result is a shelf you can finish across a long weekend. That is a genuine drawback if you want variety, and a genuine advantage if you are tired of scrolling past filler.
How We Ranked These
Three things decided the order: how well a film holds up on a second watch, whether the animation itself is doing something distinctive, and whether it earns its runtime. Awards are cited where they exist because they are fixed, verifiable facts, unlike aggregate review scores that drift week to week.
Runtime matters more here than it does elsewhere. Half of this library is shorts and specials, so a thirty-minute film that lands completely ranks above a hundred-minute one that does not.
Keep in mind that availability shifts as deals change. Confirm a title is still on the service before you build a watch night around it.
The Apple TV+ Animated Library At A Glance
Here is how the main titles compare before we get into individual verdicts:
| Title | Year | Studio | Format | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wolfwalkers | 2020 | Cartoon Saloon | Feature | Anyone who wants one great animated film |
| The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse | 2022 | Apple Original | Short | A quiet half hour, alone or with kids |
| The Velveteen Rabbit | 2023 | Apple Original | Short feature | Younger kids and nostalgic parents |
| Blush | 2021 | Skydance Animation | Short | A single sitting, no commitment |
| Luck | 2022 | Skydance Animation | Feature | Low-stakes family movie night |
| Snoopy Presents specials | 2021 onward | WildBrain | Specials | Peanuts fans of any age |
Two titles on that table are award winners and one is a first-time studio effort. The gap between the top and the bottom of this list is wider than the gap on any comparable service.
1. Wolfwalkers (2020)
Wolfwalkers is a hand-drawn 2020 feature from Ireland's Cartoon Saloon, set in 1650 Kilkenny. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and is the strongest film on Apple TV+.
Robyn Goodfellowe arrives in Kilkenny with her father, an English hunter hired to clear the surrounding forest of wolves. She meets Mebh, a wild girl whose spirit leaves her body as a wolf while she sleeps, and the film turns from a colonial adventure into something stranger and considerably better.
The craft is what elevates it above every other title here. Cartoon Saloon draws the walled town in rigid, ruled straight lines and the forest in loose charcoal and woodcut textures, so the visual language itself argues the film's point about order against wildness.
Cartoon Saloon had already earned three Academy Award nominations for The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and The Breadwinner. Wolfwalkers made four, and losing to Soul that year was no embarrassment.
Directors Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart also refuse the usual shortcuts of the genre. There is no comic-relief sidekick, no needle-drop soundtrack, and no third-act misunderstanding invented to fill time.
Watch it on the best panel you own. The linework and washed color reward a good display, and our guide to the best gaming TVs covers screens that handle this kind of hand-drawn detail without smearing motion.
Watch if you like: Song of the Sea, Princess Mononoke, The Secret of Kells.
2. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2022)
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is a roughly half-hour hand-drawn short adapted from Charlie Mackesy's book. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2023.
Mackesy's illustrated book sold millions on the strength of ink-and-watercolor drawings paired with short lines of dialogue about fear, kindness, and asking for help. The adaptation, co-directed by Mackesy and Peter Baynton, preserves that exact texture instead of smoothing it into conventional studio animation.
A lost boy meets a mole who loves cake, a wary fox, and a horse who turns out to be able to fly. There is almost no plot in the conventional sense, and the film is honest enough not to manufacture one.
It runs about half an hour, which is precisely right. Any longer and the sentiment would collapse under its own weight; at this length it is the most re-watchable thing on the service.
Watch if you like: The Snowman, Ernest & Celestine, quiet films that decline to explain themselves.
3. The Velveteen Rabbit (2023)
Margery Williams published The Velveteen Rabbit in 1922, and the story has survived a century because its central idea is unusually durable — a toy becomes real by being loved hard enough to wear out. Apple's version blends live-action framing with animated sequences rather than committing fully to either medium.
The hybrid approach works better than it sounds on paper. The animated passages carry the emotional weight while the live-action anchors the nursery, and the whole thing lands well under an hour.
This is the most straightforwardly kid-facing title in the top half of the list. Adults will find it slight, which is not really a criticism of a film aimed squarely at six-year-olds.
Watch if you like: Room on the Broom, Paddington, bedtime-adjacent viewing.
4. Blush (2021)
Blush is a 2021 Skydance Animation short about an astronaut stranded on a dwarf planet who meets a mysterious visitor. Director Joe Mateo made it after losing his wife, and grief is the whole subject.
An astronaut crash-lands alone on a barren rock. A woman appears, a garden grows, and the short compresses an entire relationship into about a quarter of an hour without a line of dialogue.
Skydance's polished CG occasionally fights the material — this is a story that might have breathed more in hand-drawn form. What rescues it is the restraint of the ending, which refuses to soften what the film is actually about.
Watch if you like: Bao, La Luna, animated shorts that earn their sentiment instead of demanding it.
5. Luck (2022)
Luck was Skydance Animation's first feature and the studio's biggest swing to date. Sam Greenfield, the unluckiest person alive, follows a talking black cat into the Land of Luck and discovers a bureaucracy that manufactures fortune and misfortune on an industrial scale.
The world-building is the good part. The Land of Luck is genuinely inventive as a setting, and the voice cast — Eva Noblezada, Simon Pegg, Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg — is stronger than the material it is handed.
Where it falters is the script. Too much of the runtime goes to characters explaining the rules of the world out loud, and reviews at release reflected that; it reads as a studio's first attempt rather than a finished statement.
It still functions perfectly well as a family movie night. Just do not lead with it if you are trying to convince someone the Apple TV+ animation slate justifies a subscription.
Watch if you like: Monsters, Inc., Onward, high-concept worlds with tidy resolutions.
The Snoopy Presents Specials Deserve Their Own Category
Apple TV+ holds exclusive rights to the Peanuts library, including the Snoopy Presents specials. Each runs around forty minutes, which places them between a short film and a family feature.
Apple's Peanuts deal delivered the classic holiday specials plus a continuing run of new WildBrain-produced entries under the Snoopy Presents banner. Titles include For Auld Lang Syne, It's the Small Things, Charlie Brown, One-of-a-Kind Marcie, and Welcome Home, Franklin.
The new specials are considerably better than they had any obligation to be. Welcome Home, Franklin takes the strip's first Black character seriously rather than treating him as set dressing, and One-of-a-Kind Marcie is a sharp piece of writing about a quiet kid handed leadership she never asked for.
They sit outside the main ranking because they are specials rather than films. If you are subscribing primarily for family viewing, though, they are arguably the highest-volume reason to stay subscribed.
Do Not Skip The Shorts
Streaming rankings usually ignore short films because they are hard to surface in an interface built for features. On a library this size, ignoring them would mean throwing out the Oscar winner.
Apple has been unusually willing to fund animation running fifteen to forty minutes — a length most studios avoid because it fits neither theatrical nor episodic economics. Two of the four best animated things on the service sit in exactly that range.
Watching From Outside The US
Apple TV+ shows the same animated catalog worldwide. Because the titles are originals rather than licensed content, there are no regional rights splits between the US, UK, and Australia.
This is the one place where a small originals-only library beats a large licensed one outright. Viewers in London, Sydney, and Chicago see an essentially identical slate, with no VPN gymnastics and no region wall.
Compare that with horror movies on Max and other licensed catalogs, where a title can vanish from one country's library while staying in another's. Apple's model sidesteps the problem entirely.
How Apple TV+ Compares To Other Services For Animation
Disney+ wins on volume and on the Pixar and Ghibli catalogs outright. Netflix commissions more animated originals than anyone, though its hit rate is inconsistent enough that a large share of the library is filler.
Apple's position is narrower and clearer: roughly half a dozen animated titles, two of them award winners, and none of them streaming anywhere else. That is a different value proposition from "we have everything," and for some viewers it is the better one.
Keep in mind that a single month's subscription covers this entire list comfortably. Shorts and specials included, the whole ranked library runs to well under ten hours.
Where The Library Still Falls Short
There is no adult-oriented animated feature here — nothing in the register of Persepolis, Waltz with Bashir, or Flee. Everything on the service reads as all-ages, which leaves a real gap for viewers who want animation aimed squarely at grown-ups.
Volume is the other problem. If you want to watch animation several nights a week, this library will not carry you, and you would be better served by anime movies on Crunchyroll or the far deeper catalog covered in our fantasy movies on Disney+ guide.
Apple TV+ works best as a second or third service rather than a primary one. Subscribe for a month, watch the four titles that matter, and cancel without guilt.
What To Watch First
Your best starting point depends entirely on how much time you have and who is on the couch. Here is how we would sequence it:
- If you only have two hours. Watch Wolfwalkers. It is the single best argument for the service and it stands completely on its own.
- If you only have thirty minutes. Watch The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. Short, complete, and the least demanding great thing on the platform.
- If you are watching with young kids. Start with The Velveteen Rabbit, then work through the Snoopy Presents specials in whatever order they surface.
- If you want background for a rainy Saturday. Luck fills the slot, with the caveat that it is the weakest title on this list.
All of the above assumes you are subscribing for animation specifically. If you are already paying for the service, the shorts alone justify an evening.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Wolfwalkers on Apple TV+ worth watching?
Yes. It is the strongest animated film on the service — hand-drawn by Ireland's Cartoon Saloon, nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and built on two distinct visual styles for town and forest.
Does Apple TV+ have Pixar or Disney animated movies?
No. Apple TV+ carries almost entirely original productions, so Pixar and Disney titles live on Disney+ instead. Apple's animation comes from Cartoon Saloon, Skydance Animation, and WildBrain.
Is Luck on Apple TV+ any good?
It is the weakest of the features. Luck has polished Skydance animation and a likable premise, but the story leans hard on exposition and reviews were mixed. Fine for a family watch, not a first pick.
Are the Snoopy specials on Apple TV+ full movies?
Most run around forty minutes, so they sit between a short and a feature. Apple holds exclusive rights to the Snoopy Presents specials, including One-of-a-Kind Marcie and Welcome Home, Franklin.
Is the Apple TV+ animated library the same in every country?
Broadly yes. Because the catalog is built from originals rather than licensed titles, there are no regional rights splits, so viewers in the US, UK, and Australia see essentially the same animated slate.
How many animated movies does Apple TV+ actually have?
Fewer than a dozen worth ranking, counting shorts and specials. The library is small by design, since Apple launched with no back catalog and grew animation through selective acquisitions rather than volume.
The Verdict
Apple TV+ is a supplementary animation service, and it is an unusually good one at that job. Two of these films are the equal of anything on a larger platform, and neither is available anywhere else.
Browse the rest of our streaming rankings — including action movies on Prime Video — for the nights when this library runs dry.
