Most movies focus on human beings as films are created by people, written by people, and acted by people. Live-action works tend to revolve around humans, but animation is less restricted in this regard.
The physical appearance of the cast is meaningless in most animations. Writers and animators have much more freedom to make their characters anything they want. Many films still involve people in their stories, at least to some degree. However, some animated films eschew them entirely. There are several fantastic animated films that don't feature any humans.
10 Zootopia Uses Animals As Human Stand-Ins
Zootopia is like many animated movies in that it focuses on anthropomorphized animals who live in a world remarkably like 21st-century America. The only difference is the species of its characters. Zootopia isn't rare in using humanoid animals. However, it does go further than many works to explore the implications.
Zootopia focuses on Judy Hopps, a young rabbit who aspires to be a police officer. As she begins her new career, she meets and eventually befriends a cunning fox named Nick. Instead of using the animal characters just for fun visuals, the plot explores the realistic social consequences of predator and prey animals attempting to coexist.
9 The Lion King Retells A Classic Story With Lions
The Lion King takes place in the Pride Lands, somewhere in Africa. The Pride Lands are seemingly untouched by humanity because not one human appears in the film. Instead, the film follows the lion Simba, as well as the warthog Pumba and the meerkat Timone.
The Lion King's story is very similar to Hamlet, but with lions standing in for the human characters. Unlike many films, these animals are not overly anthropomorphized. They speak and think like humans, but walk about on four legs and act like animals. The Lion King is one of the most famous animated films in the history of cinema, and its adorable and compelling characters are largely to thank.
8 Cars Follows Humanity's Creations
Cars takes after many Pixar movies by having non-human protagonists. Even though cars are built and maintained by people, there aren't any in Cars or its sequels. Instead, the film's world is inhabited by sentient vehicles with no mention of how they were built. The movie follows Lightning McQueen, a rookie racer in the Piston Cup.
Towns, stadiums, roads, and other signs of human civilization are everywhere in Cars. More conspicuously absent are the people who would have built them, which has led many fans to create dire and apocalyptic theories. While many fans either love or despise Cars, it's a fun story with great animation.
7 The Lego Batman Movie Does Away With The Human Element
The Lego Movie tells an in-universe story led by its LEGO protagonists. However, it also contains a second storyline, set in the real world, about a boy named Finn playing with his father's LEGO. The two overlap, with the resolution of the latter story helping to resolve the former.
The Lego Batman Movie does away with the real-world storyline and simply focuses on the in-universe story of its LEGO characters. Despite this change, the movie received critical praise for its voice acting, visuals, and humor. The characters in The Lego Batman Movie treat each other like people, but viewers know that there are real humans in the same fictional universe who don't appear.
6 Kung Fu Panda Takes Place In A Different Version Of Ancient China
Kung Fu Panda's central premise is in its name. The critically-acclaimed film follows Po as he becomes a martial arts master and finds his self-esteem. All three films in the franchise were a critical and commercial success for their themes and animation, with Kung Fu Panda even winning an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Po's journey takes place in a heavily fictionalized version of ancient China, drawing on the Wuxia genre of fiction. One of the biggest departures from the real world is that there are no people. Instead, it's entirely inhabited by anthropomorphic animals. In this manner, Kung Fu Panda actually draws on kung fu's history, as many styles of kung fu are inspired by the movements of animals, adopted by humans.
5 Ice Age 2: The Meltdown Is An Animal-Focused Story
Some people forget that humans are central to the first Ice Age's plot. Ice Age revolves around Manny, Diego, and Sid attempting to return a human child to its tribe. This is somewhat accurate to the last real-world ice age when humans coexisted with animals like mammoths.
Humans are nowhere to be seen in Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. Instead, its plot focuses entirely on its animal protagonists as they try to escape the valley. The Meltdown provides another heartwarming tale of survival and love, but this time, Manny falls in love with a fellow mammoth named Ellie.
4 Onward Focuses On Fantasy Creatures
Onward doesn't tell a story about animals, like many animated films. Instead, it turns to the fantastical and mythological. Its protagonists are elves and creatures like manticores, centaurs, and cyclopes appear throughout the movie. Onward contrasts its fantastical inhabitants with the mundanity of their 21st-century world.
Onward draws heavily on classic fantasy, and also on more modern urban fantasy, but with one key difference: there are no humans in the film. Though the film's financial success was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, fans and critics enjoyed Onward's themes of love, death, and family as the brothers try to bring their late father back to life.
3 Robin Hood Turns The Titular Character Into A Fox
Robin Hood is an old English folk tale that has been inspired by several real-world heroic outlaws. As all of these outlaws were human, so are most depictions of Robin. However, this isn't the case in Disney's 1973 Robin Hood, which turns the cast into animals.
Robin Hood and Maid Marian are foxes, Little John is a grizzly bear, and King Richard and Prince John are both lions. This turns Robin Hood into a fun adventure story with lovable, adorable characters who are voiced by talented actors.
2 Sing Features Singing Animals
Sing is an unexpectedly popular musical animated film. Its plot focuses on a struggling theater that hosts a singing competition to save it from foreclosing. Entrants include a singing mouse and the kind-hearted son of a bank robber.
These characters could all easily be human, but Sing turns them into anthropomorphic animals. Sing uses this cleverly in some ways; Rosita is so put-upon because she has so many litters of piglets and Johnny's father uses his intense gorilla strength in his criminal endeavors. For the most part, however, Sing doesn't explore the consequences of its animal-filled world. Instead, the 2016 movie focuses on the theme that people should always do what makes them happy.
1 A Bug's Life Sticks To The Small Picture
Anthropomorphic animals are common in animated movies. However, A Bug's Life stands out from the rest by focusing on anthropomorphic insects, and its protagonists, antagonists, and side characters are all bugs. A Bug's Life follows a colony of ants as they try to gather food for a horde of cruel grasshoppers.
Many Pixar films show humans from the perspective of other creatures. A Bug's Life omits them entirely. Instead, it uses its hierarchical insect world to make several points about human society. Its characters represent humans even more strongly than in several other Pixar movies.