Movies Like
Movies Like Spider-Verse: Animation That Breaks Its Own Rules
By Jordan A. · · Updated · 5 min read
The thing Into the Spider-Verse did was not a story trick. It was a decision to stop pretending animation has to look like one thing. Different frame rates for different characters, halftone dots printed over the image, hand-drawn linework left visible on top of CG. It made a lot of very expensive animated films look identical to each other overnight.
So this list is built on technique, not on genre. Every film here made a formal choice you can see on screen, and every one is a feature film rather than a series, because that is the question being asked. If a pick is only available on rental, that is normal for animation. Where a title streams changes constantly, and the title page on BingeNext shows current US options.
Films that invented their own look
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) is the obvious next step and it earns it. Each universe gets its own rendering style, so Gwen's world runs on watercolor that bleeds with her mood and the Mumbattan sequence is built on a completely different line weight. It shares the comic-panel logic with the first film. The difference is scale: it is longer, denser, and ends mid-sentence, so know that going in.
The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) came from the same Sony pipeline and pushes the doodle instinct further, layering hand-drawn scribbles, lens flares and internet-brain visual noise over a road trip. It shares the "let the artist's hand show" principle. It is sillier and warmer than Spider-Verse, aimed squarely at families, and the emotional core is a dad and daughter rather than a hero's origin.
Klaus (2019) is the counterargument. Sergio Pablos built a traditionally animated Christmas film for Netflix that uses a custom lighting and texturing system so 2D drawings hold volume and shadow the way CG does. It shares the ambition to make hand-drawn work look impossible. It is far gentler in tone, and it is the best-looking Christmas film in decades.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) is the film where DreamWorks watched Spider-Verse and answered it. Stepped frame rates in the fights, painterly backgrounds, smear frames left in. It shares the exact animation philosophy. The difference is that the story underneath is a straightforward, genuinely moving one about mortality. Best entry point for someone who thinks they do not like animation.
Films that used a medium nobody else uses
Loving Vincent (2017) was painted. Every frame is an oil painting on canvas in Van Gogh's style, produced by a team of over a hundred painters. It shares nothing with Spider-Verse tonally, and everything with it in the belief that the surface of the image is part of the story. It is a murder-mystery of sorts, slow and mournful. Choose it for the craft and accept the pacing.
The Peasants (2023) is by the same directors, DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, using the same painted technique on a Polish literary adaptation. Harder, angrier, and less of a novelty than Loving Vincent, because the technique is now serving a brutal story about a village turning on a woman.
Flee (2021) is an animated documentary. Jonas Poher Rasmussen animated the testimony of a friend who fled Afghanistan as a child, using animation precisely because the subject needed to stay unidentifiable. It shares the idea that the form should be chosen for a reason. Nothing about it is fun. It is the most useful film on this list if you want to see what the medium can do that live action cannot.
Waltz with Bashir (2008) did this first, in 2008, with Ari Folman animating his own missing memories of the 1982 Lebanon War. The style is stark and cut-out, and the last minute of the film breaks its own rules in a way you will not forget.
Films with a distinctive hand-drawn voice
I Lost My Body (2019) follows a severed hand crossing Paris. Jeremy Clapin's French film runs two timelines with two different palettes and treats a body part as a full character. It shares Spider-Verse's willingness to build a premise nobody would greenlight twice. It is quiet, sad, and only about 80 minutes.
Wolfwalkers (2020) from Cartoon Saloon in Ireland uses visible pencil construction lines and shifts its entire visual grammar between the walled town, drawn in hard straight lines, and the forest, drawn in loose spirals. That is exactly the Spider-Verse trick of letting style carry meaning. It is a children's film that adults tend to love more.
Persepolis (2007) is Marjane Satrapi adapting her own graphic novel in stark black and white, keeping the comic's flat panels rather than smoothing them into film. It shares the graphic-novel-on-screen instinct completely. It is a memoir about growing up during the Iranian revolution, so the register is autobiography rather than adventure.
A Letter to Momo from Hiroyuki Okiura and Production I.G premiered in 2011 and reached Japanese cinemas in 2012. It is the least stylised pick here and it is on the list for the opposite reason: the animation is so precise about weight, humidity and how a kid moves through a house that it becomes its own kind of showing off. Choose it if you want something calm after all the maximalism.
Where to start
If you want the closest match to the Spider-Verse feeling, watch Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, then Across the Spider-Verse. If you want to be surprised by what animation is for, watch Flee. If you want the single most beautiful object on the list, it is Loving Vincent. And if you have kids in the room, Klaus and Wolfwalkers both work without anyone having to pretend.
Picking the next one is the annoying part, which is why BingeNext for movies exists. Type in two or three films you loved, and it comes back with a ranked shortlist, each pick carrying a one-line reason and where it streams. A run takes about a minute, and the free tier covers a pick a day without an account.
Topics covered: animated, superhero, innovative, visual-effects, action, adventure
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and is responsible for every guide published on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu. Dates, season counts and where-to-watch details in these guides are checked against official sources before publishing, and corrections are welcome at Jordan@Bingenext.com.