8. “The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales”
With more foreign animations (espeically from Asia) making inroads domestically, and with big-budget family animations often taking more note of older kids and adults in the audience, it’s a delight to come across a film so unabashedly aimed at younger kids that still is such a joy for the accompanying parents to watch. The producing team behind “Ernest and Celestine” mine a similar vein of sweet, silly but also naively wise slapstick in Benjamin Renner and Patrick Imbert‘s “The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales” a comependium of three stories all revolving around the same countryside farmyard. In the first, a lazy stork recruits three of the farmyard’s inhabitants to deliver a baby; in the second a would-be cunning fox inadvertently becomes a surrogate mother to the little chicks he’s hoping to eat; and in the third the animals of the farmyard (which is run like a little self-contained town) believe they’ve killed Santa Claus and do their best to make amends. All three stories are framed with a charming device in which the dynamic, sketchpad-style characters present the funny little fables as though they’re stage plays that are only barely ready for curtain-up and by the close you’ll be bravo-ing their well-earned bow. — Jessica Kiang
7. “BoJack Horseman” (Season 4)
Netflix’s fantastically silly and meaningfully melancholy “BoJack Horseman” is one of the absolute finest shows on television — animated or otherwise. Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s wonderfully wacky, oddly profound anthropomorphic animal-centric program has remained consistently excellent since the second half of its turbulent-but-ultimately-rewarding first season. But with its introspective and more intertwined fourth year, the brilliantly bizarre, increasingly blue-hearted streaming series grew even more, well, human. Benefitted by the addition of the arrestingly sweet Hollyhock (voiced adorably by Aparna Nancherla), along with a stronger female presence — both in front of the screen and behind-the-scenes — and more character-driven narratives, the Will Arnett-lead Hollywood satire remains deeply sardonic in its exaggerated vision of entertainment culture.Where many sitcoms fall into a tired formula at this point in the game, “BoJack Horseman” powerfully and enthusiastically pushes itself harder into deeper, dark territory with every new 12-episode installment. It’s hard to guess just how long Waksberg and his crew will keep plunging into the surreally sorrowful misadventures of this drunken, washed-out, self-destructive former A-lister. Here’s hoping they only continue to get better with each great season. — Will Ashton
6. “Dear Basketball”
When superstar animator Glen Keane left Disney following a protracted battle during the production of what would ultimately become “Tangled,” it was unclear where he’d go or what he’d do. (This was the guy that standardized the look of the “Disney Princess” during the company’s second golden age of animation for crying out loud.) As it turns out, he was able to indulge his more experimental tastes, first with a gorgeous VR project and now with a short film centered around Kobe Bryant and his impending retirement. (It’s easy to draw the parallels between two greats who left their respective fields at the top of their game.) Narrated by Bryant and rendered with hand drawn animation, it follows his love of the game, from a small child to the heights of the NBA. It’s short but profoundly moving (the swelling score by John Williams is enough to bring a tear to your eye alone), a film rich in feeling and sentiment and free of braggadocio or self-aggrandizement. Regardless of how you feel about the player (or the sport in general), “Dear Basketball” (currently available on Verizon’s go90 app) will make your heart swell. It’s a slam-dunk.
5. “Rick and Morty” (Season 3)
It seemed like it would never happen. Even after an April Fools Day debut of the season’s first episode (preempting a previously scheduled episode of “Samurai Jack”), it felt like the third season of the beloved Adult Swim series wouldn’t actually materialize. But then, it did. And what a season it was. This was arguably the silliest and most sinister season yet, with creators Justin Roil and Dan Harmon pushing the show to its absolute breaking point. In fact, there’s no promise that the show will even return. If “Rick and Morty,” the most popular animated series on cable, quits now, then it will be incredibly faithful to the show’s anarchic spirit. Among the highlights of this season was a half hour stylized after “Mad Max,” an episode where Rick transformed himself into an instantly iconic pickle version of himself, and lots of emotionally raw family dynamics (exemplified by the painful path of divorced dad Jerry, voiced with surprising compassion by Chris Parnell). But the season (and, perhaps, the entire show) hit its zenith with “The Ricklantis Mixup,” an episode set almost entirely within the Citadel, a world populated solely of versions of Rick and Morty. The most overtly political episode of the show, it concluded with the single most shocking moment in the entire series.
