There is something hypnotic about the ocean, and it is a nightmare to animate. Water, light, motion, and a thousand moving creatures all at once.
So when a studio truly nails it, I pay attention.
This is my ranked list of animated movies about fish and ocean animals, counting up to the best.
Some are gorgeous, some are silly, and one or two are so bad they loop back around to fascinating.
These animated movies about fish range from Pixar’s finest to bargain-bin knock-offs, so I sorted them worst to best.
Just want the good ones?
Scroll straight to the bottom. Finding Nemo, Ponyo, and The Little Mermaid are the safe bets for family movie night. Everything above them is a gamble.
The Best Animated Movies About Fish and Ocean Animals
Fifteen films about fish and other sea animals, ranked from skip-it to unmissable. Remember, the counter runs bottom-up, so the closer you get to the end, the better it gets.
Back to the Sea
No sugar-coating where we start. Back to the Sea follows a flying fish named Kevin who gets scooped into a big-city fish market and tries to get home.
The premise is fine. The execution lives in Finding Nemo’s shadow and never climbs out, with stiff animation and forgettable characters.
It is not offensively bad, it is just there. Watch it only if a small child specifically demands more fish.
Izzie’s Way Home
Izzie is a little aquarium fish, bullied for her odd-colored scales, who gets dumped into the open ocean and separated from her dad after an underwater volcano goes off.
If that sounds like Finding Nemo, that is no accident. This is a mockbuster from The Asylum, built to catch families who grabbed the wrong case off the shelf.
The message about accepting yourself is sweet. The animation is rough and the lip-sync is worse. Little kids may not mind. You will.
Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack
Now for the wild card. Gyo is a horror film based on Junji Ito’s manga, and it is technically about fish. Specifically, undead fish that sprout metal legs, crawl onto land, and hunt people using a foul “death stench.”
It is grotesque, feverish, and nothing like the family films around it. Tadashi and Kaori just want to survive the night.
This is the one horror pick on the list, so treat it as the odd one out. If body horror is not your thing, swim right past it. If it is, you will not forget it.
Deep
Set in a flooded future where humans have abandoned Earth, Deep follows a curious dumbo octopus of the same name, along with his anglerfish and shrimp buddies, on a quest to save their deep-sea colony.
The underwater world is colorful and imaginative, with a few surprisingly pretty sequences. The problem is the story, which borrows so heavily from Finding Nemo that critics flat-out called it a knock-off.
Kids will happily sit through it. Adults will clock every part it lifted from better movies.
The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning
This 2008 direct-to-video prequel rewinds to a young Ariel in a kingdom where music has been outlawed, and shows how she fell for the surface world before the classic film.
It is the third and final entry in the straight-to-video Little Mermaid trilogy, made by Disneytoon Studios rather than the main animation team, and you can feel the budget gap.
It is harmless and pleasant, and completely skippable unless you have a kid who cannot get enough of Ariel.
A Fish Tale
Also known as Help! I’m a Fish, this 2000 Danish film has a killer hook. Three kids drink a mad scientist’s potion, turn into fish, and have just 48 hours to find the antidote before they are stuck that way for good.
The 2D animation is bright and fluid, the stakes feel real, and there is a shockingly catchy pop song buried in here that will lodge in your skull for a week.
It is a cult favorite for a reason. Rough in spots, but one of the more underseen animated movies about fish out there.
The Incredible Mr. Limpet
A slice of old-school charm from 1964. A timid, fish-obsessed man played by Don Knotts (yes, Barney Fife) wishes so hard to become a fish that he gets his wish, then helps the US Navy hunt submarines in World War II.
It blends live action with animation, so the fish scenes are hand-drawn while the people are real. That mix was a big deal at the time.
It is dated and goofy, but there is a reason folks my parents’ age still remember it fondly.
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
The second SpongeBob film mixes the usual Bikini Bottom antics with a big third act where the gang surfaces onto a live-action beach as CG superheroes. It is as chaotic as it sounds.
There is even a bizarre nod to The Shining that had me tilting my head. It does not top the original, but it kept the whole theater laughing.
Turn your brain off and enjoy the nonsense.
Shark Tale
DreamWorks leaned hard on its voice cast here. Will Smith is Oscar, a small-time fish who lies his way to fame by claiming he killed a shark. Robert De Niro is a shark mob boss, and Jack Black plays his sweet, vegetarian, secretly-harmless son Lenny.
The plot is thin and the fish-with-celebrity-faces designs split people down the middle. But the cast is having fun, and the undersea city looks great.
Not a classic, but a painless watch with some real laughs.
The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
The first big-screen SpongeBob is basically a perfect, feature-length episode. SpongeBob and Patrick road-trip to Shell City to recover King Neptune’s crown, cross paths with a David Hasselhoff cameo, and save Bikini Bottom.
Steve Hillenburg kept the show’s exact weird, warm energy intact, which is not a given when a cartoon jumps to the big screen.
If you grew up on it, this holds up. The whole gang is at their best.
The Sea Beast
This is where the list gets great. The Sea Beast is a swashbuckling Netflix film about a world of monster hunters who sail out to kill giant sea beasts, and the orphan girl who befriends one instead.
The animation is stunning, the ocean physics are top-tier, and underneath the adventure is a sharp message about who gets to write history.
It earned an Oscar nomination, and it is one of the best-looking animated movies about fish and sea creatures in years.
Watch it for:
- Gorgeous, weighty water and creature animation.
- A truly moving friendship between a hunter and a monster.
- Real emotional stakes under the spectacle.
Finding Dory
Pixar’s follow-up to Nemo hands the spotlight to Dory, the forgetful blue tang voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, as she sets off to find the family she barely remembers.
It does not quite recapture the lightning of the original, but the memory-loss angle gives it real heart, and Hank the grumpy octopus is a total scene-stealer.
Gorgeous, funny, and quietly emotional, and one of the animated movies about fish that earns its sequel.
The Little Mermaid
The 1989 film that basically saved Disney animation. Ariel, a mermaid princess, trades her voice for legs to chase life on land, with Sebastian the crab and Flounder the fish along for the ride.
The songs are all-timers, the animation is fluid, and Ursula is one of the great villains. I showed it to my young cousin recently and watched him fall for it exactly like I did at his age.
A certified Disney classic that still holds up decades later.
Ponyo
Hayao Miyazaki’s loose, joyful riff on The Little Mermaid. Ponyo is a goldfish who befriends a five-year-old boy named Sosuke, tastes human life, and decides she wants to become a little girl, whatever it does to the balance of the sea.
There is barely a villain and hardly a conventional plot, and it does not matter one bit. The film runs on pure wonder.
Oceanic aesthetic spotlight: Notice how Ponyo uses thick, hand-painted, almost crayon-like lines to make the sea feel alive. Those waves are not a slick CGI simulation, they are drawn as living creatures, which is exactly why the ocean itself feels like a character.
As an anime movie about a fish, it is pure magic. My personal favorite on this whole list.
Finding Nemo
Of course it is Finding Nemo. Pixar’s clownfish classic is the benchmark all other animated movies about fish get measured against, and it earns that.
Marlin, an anxious clownfish, crosses the entire ocean to find his kidnapped son, picking up Dory and a reef’s worth of unforgettable side characters along the way.
It is funny, it is truly moving, and the reef looks so good it made a generation want a saltwater tank. Pixar at its absolute peak.
If you somehow have not seen it, start here. If you have, you already know it belongs at number one.
The Oceanic Aesthetic: How Animators Paint Water
Water is one of the hardest things to animate, which is why the best animated movies about fish feel less like cartoons and more like windows into the deep.
Ponyo goes fully hand-drawn, treating waves like living animals (see the spotlight above).
- The Sea Beast takes the opposite path, using cutting-edge simulation so every splash carries real weight and foam. And Finding Nemo obsessed over light: the way sunbeams scatter through shallow water, the murk of the open ocean, the glow of an anglerfish lure. That attention is why the reef felt real enough to launch a thousand aquariums.
Once you start watching for it, you cannot unsee the difference between water that is merely simulated and water that is truly felt.
How Accurate Are These Movies? A Marine Biology Reality Check
Time for the fun part. Most animated movies about fish are not chasing accuracy, but how much of this holds up if a marine biologist is watching over your shoulder?
Finding Nemo is surprisingly grounded. Clownfish really do live inside anemones, and most of the species and behaviors are right.
The fact Pixar left out: clownfish can change sex. When the dominant female of a group dies, the largest male turns female. So a true-to-biology Nemo would have taken a very different turn right after the opening scene.
Shark Tale takes a decidedly, let us say, creative approach. Sharks as suited mob bosses, fish running car washes, a great white going vegetarian. Delightful, and biologically nonsense.
Ponyo and The Sea Beast never pretend to be documentaries, and that is the point. As for Gyo, its walking, gas-powered undead fish sit in a category all their own.
The Underwater Soundscape
Here is the unsung hero of nearly every one of these animated movies about fish: sound design.
Real underwater sound is muffled and strange, because water carries high frequencies differently than air. To recreate that, designers roll off the high end with low-pass filters, add a soft echo, and layer in the details we link to the deep: distant whale calls, the fizz of bubbles, the low groan of pressure. Some teams even drop hydrophones into real water to capture that muffled texture first-hand.
It is the reason a scene can feel wet before you have processed a single frame. Mute one of these films for a minute and watch how much of the ocean disappears with the audio.
The Final Word
From bargain-bin mockbusters to Pixar’s finest hour, the best animated movies about fish keep pulling animators back because the ocean is the ultimate flex.
Get the water right and you have built a whole world.
Get it wrong and even a talking fish cannot save you.
So dive in wherever you like, just remember the deep end is at the bottom.
That is where the classics are waiting.