Cartoons On Netflix You Should Be Watching

We're living in an unprecedented time for animation. Digital and traditional approaches are weaving together to create fascinating new aesthetics. Stories for all ages are thriving, from the boldest science fiction to the cozily domestic. At this point, it's not odd for an adult to enjoy something animated. Rather, it's strange when an adult doesn't count even one cartoon among the entertainment they enjoy.

Streaming services like Netflix have become an enormous part of animation's new golden age. Not only does the service allow watchers of all ages the ability to revisit childhood favorites, it enables all kinds of bold, new work from creators eager to explore the medium's possibilities. Vivacious reboots of 1980s gems are enthralling audiences new and old alike, while other shows are taking aim at subjects like mental illness, loneliness, and the rotten soul of Hollywood. Even the most traditional cartoons are breaking boundaries as they entertain, educate, and expose children to all that animation is capable of. Join us as we celebrate the best cartoons you should be watching on Netflix, from the dreamiest fantasies to the darkest nights of the soul.

Yes, you read that right. A show with both "Barbie" and "Dreamhouse" is on this list. Is it overwhelmingly pink? Absolutely. Does it feature extended gags about shoes? Oh yeah. Is Barbie her irrepressibly chipper, omnicompetent self? Very much so. Does this all come together to make one of the most charmingly bizarre works of animation currently available? Indisputably.

Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse embraces the oddness of its premise right off the bat. Structured as a reality show, complete with talking-head confessionals, the characters are animated to look like the dolls they are, with visible seams, joints, and a stiff shine to their hair. If this seems off-putting, it should. The show revels in its own weirdness. Barbie is an expert in, well, everything, with an age no one seems to be able to calculate. Baking is accomplished by throwing uncracked eggs and cartons of milk into glittery pink ovens, which emerge as intricate fantasias of frosting. Midge, created in 1963 and left out of the line for decades, is introduced as a black-and-white, pinafore-wearing goody two-shoes who marvels at her modern friends' ability to bend their arms. 

Despite this, the show never mocks Barbie and what she stands for. The surreality of her hundreds of careers, home appliances, and purses are why the show loves her and her friends — and the viewer, for cheering them on every high-heeled step of the way.

Here's a statement of actual fact: Jaden Smith co-created an anime with Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig, starring himself, Jude Law, Susan Sarandon, and a whole bunch of other luminaries of the stage, screen, and blogosphere. Yeah. That's a real thing that actually exists, and it's called Neo Yokio.

On the one hand, Neo Yokio is an outright satire. Kaz Kaan is a flippant "magistocrat" who lives in the eponymous city, frittering away his time with his robot butler, fabulous friends, and whatever demons need dispelling. The absurdities of wealth are well-skewered, from caprese martinis to exorcisms performed on Damien Hirst sculptures. One the other hand, it's clearly born from a genuine love of action anime. Kaan hurls pulsing balls of light like Goku, pals around with his buddies like Naruto, and finds courage in the face of fear like, well, every young protagonist of every mainstream anime series. 

Neo Yokio is entirely aware of how truly strange it is, to the point of almost basking in its own eccentricity — major names like Steve Buscemi, Steven Fry, and Richard Ayoade all show up as extremely minor character — but it's heart is, like the greatest animated heroes, entirely pure. They don't call it the greatest city in the alternate-timeline, magic-ravaged world for nothing.

Middle school is a fraught time period for even the most well-adjusted child. One is not quite a kid any longer, but not yet a teenager. Adult personalities, interests, and values are being shaped, explored, and solidified. Ideally, something is being learned in the classroom. These are the years when so many discover who they will go on to be, and for as weighty and meaningful as all that sounds, middle school is often, more than anything, an exercise in sheer, consuming embarrassment.

Big Mouth never loses sight of this, and that is its greatest strength. As it chronicles the lives of its motley band of middle schoolers, it finds the joy and tenderness in first romance, pubescent changes, and early fumblings towards personhood ... but it's going to serve them alongside a heaping helping of absolute awkwardness. It never shames its characters for this — an avatar of shame, literally named "the Shame Wizard," is vanquished in the second season — but it stares fully into the abyss of underbaked proclamations of love, forays into shoplifiting, and the agony of feminine hygiene products. Middle school is hard enough, Big Mouth says, so you have to look back on it and laugh. You might not be able to erase the memories of first facial hair or slobbery kisses, but you can at least get a chuckle out of them.

Science fiction glories in short stories, short films, and episodic adventures. Much of the time, these are brought together as anthologies, whether on the printed page in magazines like Amazing Stories or as part of series like The Twilight Zone. Classics of the genre were born in this way, from the modern Black Mirror to oft-adapted tales like "To Serve Man" and "It's a Good Life." Terrifying twists, shocking reveals, and thoughtful reversals are thick on the ground here, lingering in the audience's mind for decades as "that crazy story about the town controlled by the psychic kid," "the one with the cannibals," or "the episode with William Shatner on a plane."

Love, Death & Robots is another entry into this sterling canon. A collection of stories about artificial intelligence and its impact upon humans, it veers from disarmingly tender and outright vulgar to something close to nihilism. Most notably among its fellows is the fact that it's animated. The possibilities this allows, in contrast to things like The Twilight Zone, are well-explored, especially as the show doesn't stick to any one strict design. Like its stories, Love, Death & Robots ranges far afield in its aesthetics, right to the edge of what's known. Then, like all great science fiction, it peeks over the edge to catch a glimpse of what's next.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power isn't the only Netflix series giving beloved 1980s properties a modern shake-up. Before She-Ra, in fact, there was the Voltron reboot, and what a reboot it is. This incarnation of the giant robot series finds its heroes in the midst of an interplanetary war, in which the fearsome Galra Empire seeks to extend its influence by leaps and light-years. Voltron, an enormous warrior robot piloted by the five "paladins," is the only hope the universe has to stop the Galra, but the paladins are far from ready to shoulder that sort of intergalactic responsibility. One way or another, they have to learn to work and grow as a team ... or sacrifice the universe to the appetite of conquerors.

Voltron, like She-Ra, uses it revamp to find deep wells of emotion and development within the relatively shallow shells of the 1980s series. Questions of loyalty, heritage, and war are present in these heroes, who, yes, operate enormous robotic lions through space. But Voltron doesn't see tension between those facts. Rather, it imagines a sci-fi universe full of color, humor, adventure, and love, in which the '80s flights of fancy that define the series exist harmoniously with the show's more serious meditations on war. After all, what powers Voltron is what powers the show itself: many disparate elements coming together to form a cohesive whole.

Retsuko, a young woman with a steady job and dreams of love and success, is a good girl. She wants to get married. She wants to fulfill her boss's many irate demands. She wants to remain sane while doing so. But workplace drudgery has a way of grinding even the most committed employees down, and Retsuko is no exception. Release comes in the karaoke booth, where she takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, then lets loose her rage in a explosion of heavy metal screaming.

This gimmick, during which the character for "rage" appears on Retsuko's head, alongside black metal corpse paint, is the serrated soul of Aggretsuko, but it isn't what makes the cult-favorite series so special. That lies in Retsuko herself and her warmly-drawn world. Consisting of anthropomorphic animals (Retsuko is a red panda), this is a vision of Tokyo whose denizens' quirks make the city the wonderful place it is. Retsuko's friends and family might range from chic, executive cranes to slacker-genius donkey bros, but they're all people striving to do right by the world and themselves. Retsuko, for all her howling, is no different, and it's a genuine delight to watch her work towards a world in which she never has to abide by her literal pig of a boss again. In the meantime, she'll always have the karaoke booth and friends that cheer her on.