18 Best DC Animated Movies Every Fan Needs to Watch

The greatest DC animated film ever made. Period. No notes.

Under the Red Hood adapts the Jason Todd resurrection arc, with Bruce Greenwood as Batman and Jensen Ackles as the Red Hood. The emotional confrontation in the final act is one of the best Batman scenes ever animated, full stop. The dialogue isn’t trying to be quotable. It just is.

Why it’s #1: Tight 75-minute runtime, near-perfect adaptation of the comic, and an ending that genuinely shifts how you see both Batman and Jason. If you’ve never watched a DC animated film, start here.

The animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s legendary graphic novel. Older Bruce Wayne. Older world. Older grudges. Peter Weller plays an aged, exhausted, deeply scary Batman.

Watch both parts back-to-back as one continuous film. The Superman fight in Part 2 is one of the most-discussed sequences in any DC adaptation.

The Flash wakes up in an alternate timeline where Bruce Wayne died and Thomas Wayne is Batman. The Justice League never formed. Aquaman and Wonder Woman are at war. It’s bad.

Flashpoint Paradox kicked off the connected DC Animated Movie Universe (the “DCAMU”) that ran from 2013 to 2020. Even if you watch nothing else in that continuity, watch this one. The Thomas Wayne reveal is brutal in the best way.

The grand finale of the DCAMU. Every hero, every villain, every loose thread tied together for one final, devastating showdown against Darkseid.

The body count is high. The tone is dark. The ending is divisive. But as a payoff to seven years of connected animated storytelling, it’s hard to overstate how much this film accomplishes.

Watch order tip: Apokolips War only hits if you’ve watched the rest of the DCAMU first. Start with Flashpoint Paradox and work forward. Otherwise the ending will feel arbitrary.

What if Superman’s pod had landed in the Soviet Union instead of Kansas?

That’s the premise of Red Son, based on the acclaimed comic miniseries. Jason Isaacs voices Superman with weight and conflict. Diedrich Bader plays Lex Luthor as a cold-war American genius. It’s one of the most thoughtful “what if” stories DC has ever told.

This two-part adaptation finally did the iconic 1990s comic storyline justice. Superman vs. Doomsday. The death. The four replacements (Steel, Cyborg Superman, Eradicator, Superboy). Then the actual return.

Jerry O’Connell voices Superman, Rebecca Romijn voices Lois Lane, and the two-film arc is the proper version of this story that the live-action Batman v Superman attempted and missed.

Victorian-era Batman vs. Jack the Ripper. That’s the entire pitch, and the movie delivers.

Bruce Greenwood (yes, the same actor from Under the Red Hood) returns as Batman in a steampunk Gotham. Jennifer Carpenter voices Selina Kyle. The Ripper mystery has a genuinely good reveal that I won’t spoil here.

The Justice League meets the Crime Syndicate, their evil counterparts from a parallel Earth. James Woods voices Owlman (the evil Batman), and his nihilistic monologue is one of the most quoted moments in DC animation.

If you like the “what if heroes were villains” trope, this is the gold standard.

Long before the 2017 live-action film, the 2009 animated Wonder Woman told her origin story with Keri Russell as Diana and Nathan Fillion as Steve Trevor. The animation is gorgeous. The fight choreography is brutal. The mythology is right.

This was one of the first DC animated films to get this kind of acclaim, and it still holds up.

Christopher Meloni (yes, from Law & Order: SVU) voices Hal Jordan in his first ever space mission with the Green Lantern Corps. Victor Garber plays Sinestro before his fall.

What’s smart about this film is it skips most of the “Hal learns to be a Lantern” cliché and gets straight to the Corps politics. Better pacing than the 2011 live-action movie. By a lot.

An anthology of Green Lantern stories framed around Hal Jordan teaching a new recruit about the Corps’ history. Six short tales, each animated in a slightly different style.

Nathan Fillion takes over as Hal Jordan here, and he stays in the role for the rest of the DCAMU.

Adapts the classic 1980s Teen Titans comic arc where Terra betrays the team to Deathstroke. Christina Ricci voices Terra, Taissa Farmiga voices Raven, and Miguel Ferrer (in one of his final roles) voices Deathstroke himself.

Worth noting: This is the DCAMU’s Teen Titans, not the cheery Teen Titans Go! version. Tonally much closer to the original 2003 animated series, in case you bounced off Go.

Batman has secret contingency plans for taking down every member of the Justice League. Vandal Savage steals them. Chaos follows.

Kevin Conroy voices Batman, Tim Daly voices Superman. This was one of the last Justice League films to use that classic DCAU voice cast before the DCAMU rebooted everything. Felt like the end of an era.

The DCAMU’s official Justice League origin story, based on the New 52 comics. The team forms while fighting Darkseid for the first time.

Jason O’Mara becomes the DCAMU’s Batman here. Alan Tudyk plays Superman. The animation style shifted significantly with this film and continued through the rest of the connected universe.

Aquaman’s origin story, basically. Curry discovers his Atlantean heritage, his half-brother Orm declares war on the surface world, and the Justice League gets dragged into the middle.

This is the film that proved Aquaman could actually carry a serious story on screen, several years before the James Wan live-action film proved the same thing.

Batman disappears. Nightwing, Damian, Batwoman, and Batwing have to figure out what happened. The whole Bat-family ensemble carries the film.

Yvonne Strahovski voices Batwoman, and the film handles her sexuality casually and respectfully, which was meaningful in a mainstream superhero movie at the time.

The supernatural side of the DC Universe. Batman teams up with John Constantine (Matt Ryan, who also played Constantine in live action), Zatanna, Deadman, and Etrigan to fight magical threats the normal Justice League can’t touch.

Matt Ryan’s Constantine is the definitive animated version. Period.

Should not work. Absolutely works.

The Turtles end up in Gotham. They fight Batman (because of course they do). Then they team up against Shredder, who has allied with Ra’s al Ghul. Troy Baker voices both Batman AND the Joker, which is a flex.

It’s pure fun and unapologetic about it.