Netflix’s Annecy Animation Festival presence was not limited to anime. Along with its larger anime push, the streamer also revealed new looks, release dates, and details for the rest of its upcoming animation slate, which includes everything from original films and adult animated comedies to a new Ghostbusters series called Ghostbusters: Night Shift and a fresh reimagining of the classic Cinderella story titled Steps.
The lineup gives Netflix a wide range of animated projects heading into the rest of 2026 and 2027, with titles that speak to different audiences and animation styles. Some are original stories, some are reimagined fairy tales, and others are built around already beloved franchises. But together, they show how Netflix is continuing to treat animation as more than one single category.
On the film side, Netflix confirmed release dates for Steps, In Waves, and Brad Bird’s long awaited Ray Gunn.
Steps is a spellbinding new take on the Cinderella story from directors Alyce Tzue and John Ripa. The film, which will release globally on Netflix on November 20, 2026, turns the classic fairy tale on its head by giving Cinderella’s long-maligned “evil” stepsisters a chance to tell their side of the story. And based on the new footage shown, that story comes complete with stolen magic wands, high-speed chases, biker trolls, and, yes, one very hot troll.
Rather than simply retelling Cinderella from another point of view, Steps looks like it is breaking the story apart and rebuilding it as an adventure about family, identity, and belonging. The film follows Lilith, voiced by Ali Wong, who is tired of living in the shadow of the perfect Cinderella, voiced by Amanda Seyfried. On the night of the Royal Ball, Lilith steals the Fairy Godmother’s wand and accidentally turns her sister Margot, voiced by Stephanie Hsu, into a frog. Naturally, this throws the entire kingdom into chaos and breaks the Cinderella story as everyone knows it.
To fix things, Lilith has to team up with Cinderella and set the fairy tale back on track. But underneath all of the mischief, magic, and whimsy is a deeper emotional story about two very different sisters who discover they may have more in common than they thought. Tzue also spoke about connecting to the idea of searching for a place to belong, which gives the film a little more emotional weight beyond its fairy tale remix.
Netflix also showed a progression reel that gave audiences a look at how the film is coming together across its animation teams in Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Sydney. The sequence moved from early storyboards to previs and animation before adding surfacing and lighting, showing how the scene evolves from rough sketches into the final CG animation audiences will eventually see.
The footage itself leaned into Lilith’s chaotic personality, with the character directly calling out the original Cinderella story as “character assassination.” Set against Olivia Rodrigo’s “brutal,” the clip framed Lilith as someone who knows exactly how history has treated her and is ready to take control of the narrative herself. Lilith is rebellious and refuses to play by any sort of rules or conform, as noted by the skull imagery embroidered onto her dress. Sure, there are princes, glass slippers, and royal balls, but in this version, there is also revenge, deep self-reflection, deeper self-reflection, and a very attractive troll. Honestly, that sounds like the kind of fairy tale disruption worth watching.
It is the kind of premise that gives Netflix room to play with fairy tale expectations while also giving the stepsisters more dimension than the story usually allows them. The film also features Bette Midler as the Fairy Godmother and is produced by Amy Poehler, Jane Hartwell, and Kim Lessing, with Poehler and Lessing producing for Paper Kite Productions. Netflix also shared new images, previously released images, and concept art for the film.
For In Waves, Netflix highlighted the unique artistry and storytelling that drew the streamer to AJ Dungo’s moving memoir about love, loss, grief, and hope. Directed by Phuong Mai Nguyen and based on Dungo’s graphic novel, the animated feature will release globally on Netflix, excluding France, on December 11, 2026.
The film, which debuted at Cannes and will also screen at Annecy, follows AJ, a shy teenager in Los Angeles who meets Kristen, a fearless surfer. He loves skateboarding and drawing, while she lives for surfing and the ocean. Their connection quickly turns into first love, and for a moment, a happy future feels within reach. But everything changes when Kristen faces a sudden illness, forcing the two to confront something no young couple should have to endure.
In a video message, Nguyen and Dungo spoke about what it meant to bring such a deeply personal story to animation. Dungo described the experience of watching Nguyen translate his story into the medium as an honor, especially given how much of the film is built around the most tragic and consequential moments of his life.
Nguyen said she was moved by how rooted the story is in the California coast and surfing culture, but what touched her most was its universality. At its heart, In Waves is about first love, friendship, grief, and how art can help someone survive heartbreak. That is also what makes animation such a fitting medium for this story. It allows the film to move fluidly between memory, history, reality, and dreams, much like the waves themselves.
That visual language also gives In Waves room to explore more than AJ and Kristen’s relationship. The film also looks at the origins of surfing and its cultural legacy, connecting one personal love story to something larger, older, and deeply tied to the ocean. Rather than treating grief as something that can be neatly overcome, In Waves appears to understand it as something that moves through a person’s life, coming and going in ways that cannot always be controlled. But through memory, art, friendship, and love, it also finds room for healing.
Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn may have one of the stranger origin stories of Netflix’s Annecy slate, which honestly feels appropriate for a film that blends noir, science fiction, and retro-futurism. The film, which will release globally on Netflix on December 18, 2026, is set in Metropia, a gigantic city in an alternate future as imagined from 1939. The story follows private eye Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell), who is drawn into a case involving aliens, murder, and a multimedia star named Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson).
According to Bird, the idea came from a simple misunderstanding. When he first heard The B-52’s “Planet Claire” on the radio, he thought it was a new cover of Henry Mancini’s famous Peter Gunn theme. But when the song suddenly shifted into something that sounded more like a 1950s sci-fi movie, Bird’s mind started connecting the dots. Peter Gunn became Ray Gunn, Ray Gunn became a detective, and from there came the idea of a noir mystery set in a future imagined from the past. Or, as Bird described it, “The Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers.”
That combination alone makes Ray Gunn stand out, especially because animation still rarely gets to play in that kind of space at this scale. Bird has always pushed back against the idea that animation should only be used when something cannot be done in live action. To him, that thinking limits the medium. The point of animation is not simply to do the impossible. It is to heighten reality, exaggerate movement, sharpen design, and capture the essence of something in a way live action does not always allow.
Bird pointed to caricature as one of animation’s greatest strengths, not as a negative, but as a way of distilling a character, world, or movement down to its most expressive form. That is what makes Ray Gunn such a promising fit for the medium. A noir detective story already lives in shadow, attitude, tension, and style. Mixing that with science fiction and a 1939 vision of the future gives animation room to make every corner of Metropia feel more heightened, more specific, and more strange.
Bird also spoke about how animation is still too often treated as a genre rather than a medium. While he said the industry has slowly become more open to animated films aimed at older audiences, it is still rarer than he would like. For years, he has argued that there is an untapped audience of adults who love animation and want to see it used for more than family stories. Films like Persepolis helped prove that animation could stretch beyond what studios traditionally expected from it, but Bird believes there is still more room for the medium to mix things up.
That makes Ray Gunn feel like more than just another animated feature. It is Brad Bird getting to play in a world of detectives, aliens, murder, and vintage futurism while also making the case for animation as something bigger than one demographic or genre. Ray Gunn sounds like the kind of strange, stylish, adult-skewing animated film that animation fans have been wanting studios to take a chance on for years.
Ghostbusters: Night Shift is also heading to Netflix in 2027, giving the beloved supernatural comedy franchise a new animated chapter. Set in New York City in 1994, five years after the Ghostbusters took the Statue of Liberty for a walk, the series follows a new wave of supernatural terror hitting the Big Apple. This time, a group of scrappy young New Yorkers, who are untrained, underappreciated, and possibly responsible for the problem in the first place, are forced to strap on proton packs and face their fears.
For Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, executive producers of Ghostbusters: Night Shift, they wanted the animated series to be a callback to those classic Saturday Morning cartoons. For Reitman the series had to “be excellent and maybe sound a little bit scarier, maybe something not just for the kids.” “We wanted it to be dangerously funny, actually scary, and one hundred percent Ghostbusters,” Kenan said.
The setup gives Ghostbusters: Night Shift a strong hook because it is not just about bringing back ghosts, gadgets, and franchise nostalgia. Set in 1994, the original Ghostbusters have disbanded, and so when a spectral cataclysm once again threatens the city, a group of young New Yorkers will be forced to save the day, beginning as a group of disparate strangers brought together by circumstance, they’ll ultimately come together to form a new team of Ghostbusters. So, in order to do that, they’ll have to learn on the job with minimal resources and zero respect from their fellow New Yorkers.
To capture the visuals of a 1994 New York City, the team tapped into kind of the more grimy DIY punk and kind of layered street esthetic of that time, and use them as like a visual filter, giving them a methodology for the designs, textures, and characters. All of this was done to create a tactile and tangible visual language and direction for the show.
Because Ghostbusters: Night Shift takes place between the live-action films, the creative team wanted the animated series to feel like it could fit seamlessly within that world. Even though animation gives them room to push certain designs and visual ideas, the rules, logic, and atmosphere still had to feel consistent with the movies that came before and after it.
To give the series a more cinematic look and feel, the team leaned into naturalistic lighting, grounded color palettes, and a camera language that echoes live-action filmmaking. Some of the design elements are pushed slightly in a more graphic direction, but never so far that they lose the realistic core of the Ghostbusters universe. The result is a series that looks animated without feeling disconnected from the franchise’s live-action roots.
That approach makes sense for Ghostbusters, a franchise that has always balanced the supernatural with something grimy, funny, and deeply New York. Night Shift does not seem interested in reinventing that identity as much as expanding it for a new generation of ghostbusters who are clearly in over their heads.
It is about putting that mythology into the hands of a younger generation who may not be fully prepared for the mess they have helped create. Executive producers include Reitman, Kenan Ben Hibon, Elliott Kalan, Amie Karp, and Dan Aykroyd. Netflix revealed a first look, concept art, and the official logline for the series.
With Steps, In Waves, Ray Gunn, Ghostbusters: Night Shift, and THE ONE PIECE, Netflix is giving animation fans a pretty wide range of reasons to keep watching over the next year and beyond. Whether it is a fairy tale being broken apart, a love story shaped by grief and the ocean, a retro-futuristic detective story, feral cats spiraling through society, a new generation of Ghostbusters, or the beginning of Luffy’s journey, the streamer’s Annecy slate makes it clear that animation remains one of Netflix’s biggest creative priorities.
