The best family movies on Netflix (that you'll enjoy even if you don't have kids)

Hunt For The Wilderpeople, an enjoyably goofy adventure that manages to bring some freshness to the moldy “cantankerous adult reluctantly bonds with adorable kid” subgenre. Starring Sam Neill as the cantankerous adult, the film plays a bit like Jurassic Park minus Lex and dinosaurs, mining humor from the incongruity of its odd-couple pairing and basic fish-out-of-water elements, plus some Flight Of The Conchord-ish wit. []

Missing Link, the new stop-motion feature from the masters of the form at Laika, is [not] a study in stillness. There are slapstick bar fights and actual cliff-hanging. There are celebrity voices, including Zach Galifianakis in full (if genteel) rambling mode. Even the animation itself is noticeably smoother than some past stop-motion classics, with animators’ fingerprints less visible just outside (or sometimes fully inside) the frame, as Laika continues to push forward with its own medium-specific technological advances. But the movie also has the freedom of its constraints. It operates on its own little wavelength, rather than broadcasting itself loudly…. []

The Mitchells Vs. The Machines doesn’t confine its screen-time observations to metaphors: As a synth-y score builds and the Mitchells embark on a last-ditch road trip to drop Katie off at college, a new line of robo-helpers rebel against their masters, efficiently creating a (bloodless, family-friendly) apocalypse. By sheer luck, the Mitchells evade capture and become humanity’s last long-shot hope. When other humans are shipped off to the “rhombus of infinite subjugation” and rogue comic-relief robots voiced by SNL alumni become crucial to the plot, the Mitchells’ animated lineage becomes more clear: This is the latest work godfathered by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, architects of , , and … []

Cartoon Saloon is undoubtedly one of the essential underdogs of modern animation studios, perhaps only comparable to Laika in their dedication to their now-niche discipline within the medium. Their Irish Folklore trilogy, culminating in the transcendent Wolfwalkers, is an achievement of gorgeous hand-drawn animation that would be difficult for any studio to follow up—which leaves with some lofty expectations…. My Father’s Dragon is a timely parable, addressing a pre-adolescent fear stemming from the realization that parents aren’t always in control of their destiny, and affirming that it’s okay to be afraid of that uncertainty. Cartoon Saloon may here be aiming for a younger audience than usual, but there’s still a sense of maturity underpinning their film’s messaging that’s absent from a lot of their contemporaries. []

Big Holiday returns Pee-wee Herman to the highways and byways for a shaggier, less rigorously paced adventure, finding frequent and long-lasting laughs along the way. At 63, Paul Reubens’ physical and vocal range isn’t what it once was, but he still gives Pee-wee (and Big Holiday) an undeniable energy. Dulled though his tics and twitches might be, Reuben’s face still sparks to life in close-up, like a child discovering all the many ways to twist and contort the human features. It’s clear that Pee-wee and his weird, wonderful world continue to amuse and excite Reubens, and his Big Holiday collaborators share the sentiment. John Lee’s direction doesn’t have the unmistakable personal stamp of a Tim Burton, though that just gives more authorial control to the main character. Pee-wee’s Big Holiday is the Pee-wee movie that really makes its possessive apostrophe count. [] 

Frenetic and frequently funny, Penguins Of Madagascar represents the DreamWorks Animation franchise style—which boils down to self-aware, but naïve, talking animals who learn kid-friendly life lessons—at its most palatable. Indebted more to the wackiness of old Warner Bros. shorts than to the realist Pixar sensibility that informs most American animated features, Penguins is packed with gags and moves with the kind of gummy elasticity—the stuff of eye-pops, anvil drops, and giant mallets pulled out of nowhere—that’s become awfully rare in the age of computer animation. []