How Netflix Became the Unlikely King of Feature Animation

Thanksgiving weekend featured an animation face-off between a titan of the industry, the 100-year-old Walt Disney Animation Studios, and a relative upstart, Netflix, which only started releasing its own animated features in 2019.

Disney’s holiday movie, “Wish,” was a musical extravaganza featuring the watercolor backgrounds of the studio’s past combined with cutting-edge CGI, while Netflix’s “Leo” was a more budget-conscious musical set in modern-day Florida.

It was a showdown of theatrical versus streaming...