Last Updated on March 21, 2026 by Monica Castillo
Finding the right movie for a nine to twelve-year-old is one of the quiet arts of parenthood. Too young and they scoff; too old and the content doesn’t belong to them yet. The films gathered here occupy that rewarding middle ground stories complex enough to be taken seriously, filmed with enough craft and humanity to leave something behind.
All nine films below are currently available on Netflix. Each has been reviewed in the spirit of serious film criticism, with full attention paid to story, theme, visual language, and the emotional experience of watching. Ratings from IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Common Sense Media are included for every title.
1. The Wild Robot (2024)
At a Glance
| Genre | Animated Adventure / Family Drama |
| Rating | PG |
| IMDB Rating | 8.2 / 10 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer | 98% (Certified Fresh) |
| Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score | 98% |
| Common Sense Media | 4 / 5 stars |
| Common Sense Media Age Recommendation | 6+ years |
The Review
There is a particular kind of animated film that does not announce its ambitions — it simply earns them, frame by deliberate frame. The Wild Robot, directed by Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon, Lilo & Stitch), is precisely that kind of film, and it arrives as something genuinely rare: a studio animated feature so emotionally alive, so quietly devastating in its beauty, that it leaves you rearranging your feelings on the walk back from the screen.
Based on Peter Brown’s beloved middle-grade novel, the story follows Roz (voiced with luminous restraint by Lupita Nyong’o), a robot who washes ashore on a remote, uninhabited island after a shipwreck. She has no memory, no directive, no context only the island’s animals, who regard her with everything from terror to outright hostility. Slowly, methodically, Roz begins to learn: how animals behave, how the island breathes, and eventually, how to survive within it.
But the film’s true subject arrives in the form of an orphaned gosling named Brightbill (Kit Connor), who Roz accidentally hatches and must now raise as her own. You can feel the film’s emotional logic shifting here, from something resembling science fiction to something far more intimate — a meditation on what it means to care for something you did not choose, to love beyond the limits of your original programming. Sanders, who understood so beautifully in How to Train Your Dragon that the bond between species can carry tremendous emotional weight, brings that same instinct to bear here, and the result is one of the most genuinely moving cinematic pairings in recent memory.
The animation itself deserves its own essay. DreamWorks, working here in what the studio has described as its final fully in-house production for the time being, achieves something painterly and textured the landscapes feel organic, as if each leaf and storm were sketched in watercolor before being rendered digitally. There are moments a forest fire at night, a winter migration, a final confrontation between Roz and enemy machines where the imagery is so striking you might find yourself holding your breath.
Pedro Pascal voices a fox named Fink with the kind of ease that makes you forget he’s acting, and Bill Nighy lends warm authority to an older goose. But it is Nyong’o’s performance as Roz that anchors everything. She renders the robot’s awakening consciousness not as spectacle, but as something tender and almost shy curiosity unfolding gently, like a flower that doesn’t yet know it’s beautiful.
Themes of motherhood, belonging, and what it means to exist somewhere you were never meant to be ripple through every scene. This is, quietly, a film about the immigrant experience, about the outsider learning the language of a place that regards them with suspicion. It is also and here the film is disarmingly direct about letting go. The final act will break you a little, and it earns every tear.
For children aged 9 to 12, The Wild Robot is something close to essential. It trusts its young audience with complexity and grief, and it does so with the kind of visual and narrative grace that makes the experience feel genuinely cinematic. This is not a film that condescends. It is a film that believes.
2. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)
At a Glance
| Genre | Animated Comedy / Family Adventure |
| Rating | PG |
| IMDB Rating | 7.5 / 10 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer | 100% (Certified Fresh) |
| Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score | 93% |
| Common Sense Media | 4 / 5 stars |
| Common Sense Media Age Recommendation | 5+ years |
The Review
There are certain pleasures in cinema that feel less like entertainment and more like reunion — the return of characters so deeply embedded in our affection that seeing them again carries the warm weight of nostalgia even for those encountering them for the very first time. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, directed by the inimitable Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham, is exactly this kind of homecoming.
The film reunites us with the unforgettable pairing of West Wallaby Street: Wallace (voiced by Ben Whitehead, stepping into Peter Sallis’s shoes with evident care), the cheerfully muddleheaded inventor with an insatiable appetite for Wensleydale, and Gromit, his long-suffering but unwaveringly loyal beagle cinema’s most expressive dog, capable of communicating entire paragraphs of exasperated love with a single raised clay eyebrow. If you haven’t seen A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, or A Close Shave before sitting down to this, consider doing so first; not because this film requires it, but because you will want to have that history in your bones.
The plot this time concerns Norbot, Wallace’s latest invention a “smart gnome” designed to tend gardens and transform household laziness into marketable service. Gromit suspects something is deeply wrong with the reliance on automation, and his instincts, as always, prove devastatingly correct when Feathers McGraw the sinister penguin villain of The Wrong Trousers, returned from zoo imprisonment with revenge on his beady mind hijacks Norbot’s technology for his own criminal scheme.
What lifts the film beyond affectionate nostalgia is the sharpness of its satirical instincts. Park and Crossingham are making a quiet, pun-laden argument about AI dependency that feels remarkably urgent for a film made of clay. “Gnome Improvement” the name of Wallace’s new enterprise is one of many jokes layered through the background that demand a second viewing just to catch. Gromit’s bedtime reading is A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woof. The narrowboat in the climax is named something that will delight fans of The African Queen.
In a cinematic landscape increasingly reliant on digital excess, the Aardman aesthetic each frame the product of patient human hands, each texture the result of physical craft feels almost countercultural. That the film itself argues against machine minds replacing human artistry only deepens the resonance. You can feel it: the love pressed into each clay fingerprint.
For 9 to 12-year-olds, Vengeance Most Fowl is pure, uncut delight. It is genuinely funny across all ages, never condescending, and threaded with a message about technology and creativity that parents will appreciate as much as children. It also won the BAFTA for Best Animated Film, which is the universe confirming what audiences already knew.
3. Enola Holmes (2020)
At a Glance
| Genre | Adventure / Mystery / Period Drama |
| Rating | PG-13 |
| IMDB Rating | 6.6 / 10 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer | 91% |
| Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score | 79% |
| Common Sense Media | 4 / 5 stars |
| Common Sense Media Age Recommendation | 12+ years |
The Review
The Holmes mythology has always left room at the edges for Watson’s perspective, for Irene Adler’s implied depth, for the city of London itself as a living character. Enola Holmes, directed by Harry Bradbeer and adapted from Nancy Springer’s novel series, finds a character who has been hiding in plain sight: the youngest Holmes sibling, raised alone by an unconventionally brilliant mother, and entirely unprepared for a world that keeps mistaking her freedom for wildness.
Millie Bobby Brown, known before this for her haunted, wordless intensity in Stranger Things, reveals here a completely different register breezy, smart, infectiously direct. She plays Enola with a fourth-wall-breaking verve that could have felt gimmicky in less confident hands. Instead, it generates the kind of twinkling intimacy you might remember from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: the sense that the character is letting you in on the joke, and that the joke is mostly at society’s expense.
The story begins when Enola’s mother (a gloriously unconventional Helena Bonham Carter) disappears on Enola’s sixteenth birthday, setting the girl on a collision course with London’s Victorian machinery and her famous older brothers, Sherlock (Henry Cavill, playing him with unexpected warmth and fallibility) and Mycroft (Sam Claflin, playing him with entirely expected pomposity). The mystery of their mother’s whereabouts threads through a parallel story involving a young runaway viscount whose life is in danger, and it’s hard not to notice that the film is really about agency about who gets to decide what a young woman becomes.
The feminist subtext is not particularly subtle, but it is genuinely felt rather than merely performed, which matters enormously. Enola’s mother has raised her outside Victorian norms, trained her in martial arts, cryptography, and independent thought and the film is honest about the cost of that education. Enola is formidable and lonely in equal measure, and Brown carries both qualities without collapsing one into the other.
It is not a perfect film. The mystery is less a mystery than a series of coincidences, and the climax relies on Enola being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time in ways that require some imaginative goodwill. But the period detail is lush, the performances are consistently engaging, and Bradbeer a television director making his feature debut keeps the energy high and the pacing tight. For parents of tween daughters especially, there are few better role models currently streaming on any platform.
This is a film for 12-year-olds who are starting to ask questions about the world’s expectations of them and who deserve to see, in vivid color, a character who refuses the easy answers.
4. The Adam Project (2022)
At a Glance
| Genre | Sci-Fi / Action / Comedy |
| Rating | PG-13 |
| IMDB Rating | 6.7 / 10 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer | 68% |
| Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score | 74% |
| Common Sense Media | 3 / 5 stars |
| Common Sense Media Age Recommendation | 13+ years |
The Review
There is a particular subgenre of science fiction that has less interest in the mechanics of time travel than in its emotional possibilities what it would mean not to change history, but simply to sit across from a younger version of yourself and say the things that needed saying. The Adam Project, directed by Shawn Levy and starring Ryan Reynolds, belongs to this tradition, and while it never quite achieves the transcendence it seems to be reaching for, it earns more than critics gave it credit for.
Reynolds plays Adam Reed, a time-traveling fighter pilot from a dystopian 2050 who crashes into 2022 — accidentally landing in the backyard of his twelve-year-old self (Walker Scobell, whose talent for mimicking Reynolds’ cadence borders on uncanny). Their mission is to travel further back in time to prevent the invention of time travel itself the project conceived by their late father, Louis (Mark Ruffalo), whose work has since been weaponized by a corporate villain (Catherine Keener).
The premise is shamelessly nostalgic, channeling the spirit of ’80s adventure films with the loving self-awareness of someone who grew up watching them Back to the Future hovers in the DNA here, as does Flight of the Navigator and The Goonies. Levy, who has built a career on franchise entertainment (Free Guy, the Night at the Museum series), is in comfortable territory, and his instinct for pacing keeps the film moving even when the screenplay, credited to several writers, stumbles.
What actually works best in The Adam Project is exactly what critics overlooked. The scenes between Reynolds and Ruffalo between grown son and imperfect father carry a genuine emotional ache. Ruffalo plays Louis not as a genius but as a distracted, well-meaning man who loves his family more clumsily than competently, and there is something quietly brave about a big-budget action film willing to sit in that specific, ordinary grief.
Scobell is a genuine find. He plays young Adam not as a miniature version of Reynolds but as a boy in the process of becoming one all defensive sarcasm over a core of softness and it’s hard not to imagine a version of this film, with a tighter script, that becomes something truly memorable. Jennifer Garner, as Adam’s mother, does more with her limited screen time than the film deserves.
It is, ultimately, a film about forgiveness — of fathers, of younger selves, of the futures we can’t prevent. For kids in the 9-12 range, especially those navigating complicated feelings about family, it will land somewhere real. It is also, for what it’s worth, enormously watchable.
5. The Sea Beast (2022)
At a Glance
| Genre | Animated Adventure / Fantasy |
| Rating | PG |
| IMDB Rating | 7.0 / 10 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer | 94% (Certified Fresh) |
| Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score | 78% |
| Common Sense Media | 4 / 5 stars |
| Common Sense Media Age Recommendation | 7+ years |
The Review
There is a long tradition of stories about monsters that are really about fear — about the way societies manufacture danger in order to maintain order, and the way heroes are invented to keep ordinary people compliant. The Sea Beast, written and directed by Chris Williams, whose credits include Moana, Big Hero 6, and Bolt, belongs to this tradition, and it does so with swashbuckling confidence and genuine visual ambition.
The film is set in an age when sea monsters lurk beyond the edges of maps and hunter ships are celebrated as the crown’s finest defenders. Jacob Holland (Karl Urban, wonderfully rugged) is the greatest of these hunters fearless, legendary, and genuinely convinced of the righteousness of his trade. Then Maisie Brumble (Zaris-Angel Hator, a remarkable debut voice performance) stows away on his ship, and everything Jacob thinks he knows begins to crumble.
Maisie is one of those children who has read every official history and suspects, with the specific skepticism of the very bright, that official histories have a vested interest in what they leave out. When the sea beast the crew hunts a massive crimson creature the sailors have nicknamed Red Bluster turns out to be something other than the mindless killing machine of legend, Maisie’s willingness to see the truth, and Jacob’s slow capitulation to it, becomes the film’s beating heart.
Williams has spoken about wanting to make an adventure in the tradition of the great sea epics, and you can see that ambition in every shot. The ocean is rendered with the kind of textural richness that makes you feel the spray, and the creature designs — both monstrous and somehow endearing belong to the lineage of great cinematic creatures. The action sequences are genuinely exciting, the humor comes from character rather than reflex, and the film trusts its young protagonist completely.
It is not hard to notice, either, what The Sea Beast is actually about: the dismantling of inherited narratives, the courage required to name propaganda as propaganda, and the loneliness of being the person willing to see a creature everyone else has decided to fear. It is not subtle, but it is sincere, and sincerity counts for a great deal when the audience is nine years old and just beginning to discover that the world was explained to them imperfectly.
This is precisely the kind of animated film that will be re-watched compulsively — not for nostalgia alone, but because children will find new layers in it as they grow. Williams delivers one of Netflix’s finest animated originals, and it deserves every bit of the acclaim it received.
6. Orion and the Dark (2024)
At a Glance
| Genre | Animated Fantasy / Comedy / Coming-of-Age |
| Rating | PG |
| IMDB Rating | 6.7 / 10 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer | 72% |
| Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score | 62% |
| Common Sense Media | 3 / 5 stars |
| Common Sense Media Age Recommendation | 6+ years |
The Review
The idea of Charlie Kaufman writing a children’s movie ought to generate a certain delicious cognitive dissonance Kaufman, the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, is not exactly the name you’d expect on an animated feature about a boy afraid of the dark. And yet here we are, and the result is — predictably, wonderfully the most Charlie Kaufman-esque children’s film one could possibly imagine.
Directed by Sean Charmatz and adapted from Emma Yarlett’s picture book, Orion and the Dark follows eleven-year-old Orion (Jacob Tremblay), a boy paralyzed by fears both rational and absurd, who is visited one night by the living embodiment of Darkness itself (Paul Walter Hauser, finding warmth and offended dignity in equal measure). Fed up with being feared, Dark proposes a deal: let me show you one full night of what I actually do, and perhaps you will fear me a little less.
What follows is part road movie, part existential comedy, part meditation on the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our anxieties. Kaufman and this is where the film becomes genuinely unusual — cannot resist the metafictional spiral: the story is being told by an adult Orion to his own daughter, who objects to plot points, questions narrative choices, and at one point directly challenges the emotional logic of the ending. It is, simultaneously, a film about childhood fear and a film about how we use storytelling to process childhood fear, and the layers accumulate with a kind of reckless creative joy.
The personifications of other nocturnal elements Sleep, Insomnia, Sweet Dreams, Unexplained Noises — are inventive and funny, and Hauser’s Dark is unexpectedly touching: a being who wants nothing more than to be understood and keeps finding himself rejected for reasons entirely beyond his control. You can feel the film’s genuine sympathy for the misunderstood, for the things we fear simply because we haven’t looked at them closely enough.
The script is not entirely successful. The metafictional structure occasionally loses young viewers who might want the adventure rather than the commentary, and the tonal range is wide enough to leave certain scenes feeling slightly disconnected. But for children who experience the specific terror of darkness the night’s shapeless dread there is something genuinely comforting and quietly brave about watching a film that takes that fear seriously while insisting, gently, that the dark does not deserve it.
Orion and the Dark is imperfect but alive, which is a better condition than many children’s films manage. It is also, in its best moments, the kind of animated storytelling that rewards the adults watching alongside the kids.
7. Dog Man (2025)
At a Glance
| Genre | Animated Action-Comedy / Superhero / Family |
| Rating | PG |
| IMDB Rating | 6.8 / 10 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer | 82% |
| Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score | 81% |
| Common Sense Media | 3 / 5 stars |
| Common Sense Media Age Recommendation | 6+ years |
The Review
Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man books have sold over fifty million copies worldwide, which means a significant portion of the children currently aged nine to twelve have already formed opinions — strong ones — about their favorite half-dog, half-police-officer superhero before a single frame of this adaptation began to play. The film, directed by Peter Hastings and produced by DreamWorks Animation, has the good sense to approach the material not with the gravity of a brand steward but with the anarchic, crayon-bright energy of a child who has just discovered they can make their own movie.
The animation style is intentionally crude and exuberant — deliberately mimicking the handmade aesthetic of Pilkey’s illustrated books, in which the story is told as if drawn by an imaginative ten-year-old who has seen too many superhero movies. It is a smart artistic choice, translating the books’ DIY warmth to screen without smoothing away the rough edges that make them feel personal and owned by their young readers.
Dog Man himself, the result of a fusion surgery that attached the head of a beloved police dog to the body of an injured officer, is a wonderfully absurd hero — full of instinctive goodness, distracted by squirrels, motivated by love rather than vengeance. The film’s villain, a cat named Petey who is in the process of being reformed by the unconditional affection of his clone-son, Li’l Petey, carries the film’s genuine emotional weight. There is something unexpectedly moving about watching a character who has chosen selfishness being undone by a child’s love — and the film does not sentimentalize it, which is to its considerable credit.
It is loud, relentlessly kinetic, and occasionally quite funny in the way that only complete commitment to absurdity can be. The adult characters are broad enough to function as affectionate parodies of authority, which children of a certain age will recognize and appreciate. There is real craft in the pacing — Hastings understands that a film like this must never lose momentum — and the voice cast, including Pete Davidson and Lil Rel Howery, bring genuine personality to their roles.
Dog Man will not please adults looking for the layered emotional sophistication of The Wild Robot or the satirical wit of Wallace & Gromit. It is not trying to be those films. It is trying to be exactly what the books are — a joyful, inclusive, slightly anarchic celebration of heroism, creativity, and the idea that who we become is not determined by who we were. For nine to twelve-year-olds, particularly those who have grown up with the books, it is a genuinely satisfying translation.
8. The Bad Guys (2022)
At a Glance
| Genre | Animated Action-Comedy / Heist / Family |
| Rating | PG |
| IMDB Rating | 6.9 / 10 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer | 87% |
| Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score | 93% |
| Common Sense Media | 4 / 5 stars |
| Common Sense Media Age Recommendation | 6+ years |
The Review
Every few years, an animated film arrives that seems to have been assembled by someone who genuinely loves the cinema — not the idea of the cinema, not the nostalgia of it, but the craft, the style, the way a great sequence can make you feel like you are watching something that has never existed before. The Bad Guys, directed by Pierre Perifel in his feature debut, is that kind of film, and it announces its intentions in its very first scene: a diner booth, two criminals, a long conversation that is a precise, gleeful homage to Pulp Fiction, rendered in gorgeous 2D-inflected animation that looks unlike anything DreamWorks has produced before.
Based on Aaron Blabey’s illustrated series, the film follows a crew of animal criminals — Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), Mr. Shark, Ms. Tarantula, and Mr. Piranha — who are offered a chance at redemption: complete a rehabilitation program run by Guinea Pig philanthropist Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade, wickedly funny), and their record will be expunged. Mr. Wolf, to the horror of his crew, finds himself genuinely tempted by the idea of being good.
The animation style deserves more attention than it typically receives in mainstream coverage. Perifel has spoken about his desire to honor the expressiveness of 2D animation within a 3D framework, and the result is startlingly fresh — the characters move with a stylized, almost theatrical physicality, the action sequences unfold with the visual literacy of a Spielberg chase, and the color palette is saturated and confident in ways that feel more like European animation than American studio product.
Sam Rockwell brings his characteristic loose-limbed charm to Mr. Wolf, and the screenplay — credited to Etan Cohen — is consistently clever without losing sight of its emotional core. The film is genuinely funny across all ages, which is the achievement that matters most when parents are watching alongside their children at 8pm on a Friday night. Marc Maron’s Mr. Snake, perpetually aggrieved and secretly sentimental, is arguably the film’s most interesting character, and the friendship between Wolf and Snake carries more weight than it might appear to on first viewing.
The twist, when it comes, is well-earned rather than cheap, and the film’s central thesis — that identity is not fixed, that the stories others tell about us need not determine who we become — is delivered with enough wit and momentum that it never feels like a lesson. For children aged 9 to 12, especially those who feel labeled or misunderstood, The Bad Guys is subversive in the best possible way.
9. The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021)
At a Glance
| Genre | Animated Science Fiction / Comedy / Family |
| Rating | PG |
| IMDB Rating | 7.7 / 10 |
| Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer | 97% (Certified Fresh) |
| Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score | 91% |
| Common Sense Media | 4 / 5 stars |
| Common Sense Media Age Recommendation | 7+ years |
The Review
The Mitchells vs. the Machines arrives, in the tradition of the best animated films, with the confidence of something that knows exactly what it wants to say and has found the perfect cinematic language to say it. Produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller the creative forces behind The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and directed by Mike Rianda, it is a film about technology, family, and the strange, specific grief of being understood only by someone you love and barely know how to talk to anymore.
Katie Mitchell (voiced by Abbi Jacobson) is leaving for film school, and the emotional distance between her and her well-meaning but out-of-touch father Rick (Danny McBride) is the film’s quietest and most devastating subject. Rick, in a desperate attempt to reconnect before his daughter disappears into her future, cancels the plane ticket and insists on a cross-country road trip because surely four days trapped in a minivan will heal everything. Then, on the first day of the journey, an AI apocalypse begins.
The animation style owes a creative debt to Lord and Miller’s Spider-Verse revolution overlapping visual languages, doodles and stickers popping into frame, animated GIFs rendered within the film itself as expressions of Katie’s inner life. It is a style built to mirror the experience of a generation that thinks in memes and processes emotion through the grammar of the internet, and it works with a fluency that feels generational rather than performative.
But here is what distinguishes The Mitchells vs. the Machines from merely being visually inventive: it is also genuinely tender. Rick’s love for Katie is as inarticulate as it is enormous, and the film honors both the love and the inadequacy. McBride, casting against type in the best possible way, plays the exasperated dad with enough heart to make you forgive the obliviousness. The family’s dynamic chaotic, imperfect, occasionally embarrassing, fundamentally loyal will feel uncomfortably familiar to most children watching it.
The apocalypse itself, engineered by an AI assistant named PAL (Olivia Colman, who sounds like she’s having the time of her life), is funny and inventive and escalates at exactly the right pace. The family’s dog, Monchi, is one of cinema’s great visual gags a pug so spherical, so improbably round, that his mere presence generates laughter. Two defective robots provide comic relief with the kind of performative sincerity that children find irresistible and parents find, against all odds, equally charming.
For nine to twelve-year-olds particularly those who feel misunderstood by their parents, or who are beginning to recognize the emotional distance between who they’re becoming and who their family expects them to be The Mitchells vs. the Machines is something rare: a blockbuster that sees them completely, and loves them for it.
