From We Bought a Zoo to Finding Nemo: The 10 Best Zoo and Aquarium Movies Ever Made

From heartwarming animal tales to laugh-out-loud comedies, these are the films that celebrate the wild, wonderful world of zoos and aquariums.

June is National Zoo and Aquarium Month, a time to celebrate the incredible institutions that connect millions of people each year with the animal kingdom. Zoos and aquariums do far more than entertain. They educate, conserve, and remind us that the planet we share with thousands of other species is worth protecting. What better way to honour that than with a great film?

Movies set in zoos and aquariums have given us some of cinema’s most memorable animals, most unlikely friendships, and most unexpectedly emotional moments. Whether you are planning a real trip to your local zoo this June or simply celebrating from your living room, this list has something for every kind of animal lover.

Here are the best movies about zoos and aquariums ever made, ranked and celebrated for National Zoo and Aquarium Month.

1. We Bought a Zoo (2011)

Matt Damon plays Benjamin Mee, a recently widowed father who does something that most people would consider spectacularly impractical: he buys a dilapidated zoo in rural California and attempts to restore it to its former glory in time for reopening. Cameron Crowe directed this warm, generous film based on the true story of the real Benjamin Mee, who did exactly that in Devon, England.

What makes We Bought a Zoo work is that it never loses sight of the human story underneath the animal one. The zoo is the backdrop against which a grieving family slowly finds its way back to joy. Scarlett Johansson plays the zoo’s head keeper with quiet authority. The animals, from the aging tiger to the wolves and grizzly bears, are photographed with genuine affection.

The film also produced one of the most quoted lines of the 2010s. “You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage.” It landed then and it still lands now. We Bought a Zoo is exactly the kind of film National Zoo and Aquarium Month was made for.

2. Finding Nemo (2003)

Pixar’s underwater masterpiece is technically an aquarium film in its second act, and it uses that setting to ask some genuinely interesting questions about what captivity means for wild animals. When Nemo ends up in a dentist’s fish tank in Sydney after being scooped up by a diver, the film shifts from an ocean adventure to a contained drama about a group of tank fish planning an escape.

The aquarium sequences are among the film’s most inventive. The Tank Gang, led by the scarred and obsessive Gill, are beautifully observed characters whose desire for freedom mirrors Marlin’s desperate cross-ocean journey to find his son. The P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way sequence is burned into the memory of an entire generation.

Finding Nemo also sparked a genuine surge in public interest in marine conservation following its release, and the subsequent controversy about clownfish being purchased and immediately released into unsuitable saltwater demonstrated how powerfully film can shape public behaviour around animals. The film works equally well as pure entertainment and as an accidental argument for leaving wild animals in their natural habitats.

3. Zookeeper (2011)

Kevin James plays Griffin Keyes, a zookeeper at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston who discovers that the animals in his care can talk and are willing to share their considerable collective wisdom to help him win back an ex-girlfriend. It is not a film that demands to be taken seriously, and it absolutely does not take itself seriously.

Zookeeper is cheerful, broad, and completely aware of exactly what it is. The voice cast assembled for the animals is remarkable: Nick Nolte as a gorilla, Sylvester Stallone and Cher as lions, Adam Sandler as a monkey, and Don Rickles as a frog. James has genuine warmth and physical comedy skills, and his chemistry with the CGI animals is better than it has any right to be.

This is the film for families who want something fun and unchallenging for a National Zoo and Aquarium Month movie night. It does not pretend to be anything other than exactly what it is, and on those terms it delivers.

4. Blackfish (2013)

No list of aquarium films would be honest without including the documentary that changed the conversation about captive killer whales permanently. Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Blackfish tells the story of Tilikum, an orca held in captivity at SeaWorld who was involved in the deaths of three people, and uses that story to examine the broader ethics of keeping apex predators in theme park environments.

Blackfish is a genuinely difficult watch, not because it is exploitative but because it is methodical and fair. Cowperthwaite interviews former SeaWorld trainers who loved the animals they worked with and came to understand that the environment they were asking those animals to live in was fundamentally incompatible with their wellbeing. The film does not demonise individuals; it questions a system.

The impact of Blackfish on SeaWorld’s attendance figures, stock price, and eventual policy decisions was extraordinary and well-documented. It is one of the most consequential documentaries ever made about the relationship between humans and animals, and it belongs in any serious survey of aquarium cinema even though it is a very different kind of film from everything else on this list.

5. Madagascar (2005)

DreamWorks Animation’s comedy about four pampered Central Park Zoo animals who find themselves accidentally shipped to Madagascar is one of the most purely enjoyable animated films of the 2000s. Alex the lion, Marty the zebra, Gloria the hippo, and Melman the hypochondriac giraffe are brilliantly voiced by Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett Smith, and David Schwimmer respectively.

The film opens in the zoo and returns to it at the end, and those sequences capture something affectionate and slightly absurd about the zoo experience from the animals’ perspective. Alex has his own fan club. Marty dreams of the wild while standing in an enclosure designed to simulate it. The gap between the life they know and the life they are supposedly built for becomes the film’s central comic engine.

Madagascar launched one of animation’s most successful franchises and produced the inexplicably catchy “I Like to Move It,” which parents of a certain generation cannot hear without a mild sense of trauma. The original film holds up beautifully.

6. Free Willy (1993)

Few films have had as direct an impact on the fate of a real animal as Free Willy. The story of Jesse, a troubled young boy who befriends Willy, a captive orca at a marine park, became one of the defining family films of the 1990s. The bond between child and whale is handled with genuine emotional intelligence, and the climactic sequence of Willy leaping over the breakwater remains one of cinema’s most stirring animal moments.

The real-world story behind Free Willy is extraordinary. Keiko, the orca who played Willy, was himself living in cramped, inadequate conditions at a Mexican theme park when the film was made. Public response to the film was so overwhelming that a foundation was established to rescue and rehabilitate him. Keiko was eventually transferred to Iceland and spent his final years in a sea pen before dying in 2003.

Free Willy is not a subtle film, but it does not need to be. Its emotional directness is precisely what gives it power, and its legacy in terms of real-world animal advocacy is unmatched by almost any other film on this list.

7. The Penguins of Madagascar (2014)

Spun off from the Madagascar franchise, this feature film following the four penguin characters, Skipper, Kowalski, Rico, and Private, is significantly funnier and more inventive than it has any right to be. The penguins were always the best part of the Madagascar films, and giving them their own story allows the franchise’s sharpest comic energy to operate without interruption.

The plot involves a villainous octopus with a grudge against penguins, a secret spy organisation called the North Wind, and more absurdist set pieces than most comedies manage in an entire series. The film moves at a relentless pace and packs in more jokes per minute than almost any animated film of its era.

For families celebrating National Zoo and Aquarium Month with younger children, this is an excellent choice. It is also, quietly, one of the better spy comedy parodies of the decade.

8. Zootopia (2016)

Disney’s Zootopia, or Zootropolis (depending where you live) is built around a city inhabited entirely by evolved, civilised mammals, and while it is not a zoo film in the traditional sense, it spends a great deal of time thinking carefully about the relationship between predators and prey, nature and society, wildness and domestication.

The film works as a detective story, a buddy comedy, and a surprisingly sophisticated examination of prejudice and systemic bias. Judy Hopps, a rabbit police officer navigating a city where structural discrimination runs deep, is one of Disney’s best protagonists. Her partnership with Nick Wilde, a fox who has learned to become exactly what society expects him to be, is beautifully developed.

Zootopia won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and deserved it. It is also one of the most thoughtful films ever made about what it means for different species to coexist and Zooptopia 2 is just as good!

9. Dolphin Tale (2011)

Based on the true story of Winter, a bottlenose dolphin who lost her tail after becoming entangled in a crab trap and was subsequently fitted with a prosthetic tail at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida, Dolphin Tale is one of the more genuinely moving family films of the 2010s.

The real Winter became a symbol of resilience and rehabilitation, and the Clearwater Marine Aquarium she called home became one of the most visited aquariums in the United States following the film’s release. The film handles the animal sequences with real care and avoids the sentimentality that could easily have overwhelmed a story this emotionally loaded.

For National Zoo and Aquarium Month, Dolphin Tale makes a particularly fitting choice because it centres on an aquarium that genuinely does the conservation and rescue work that makes these institutions valuable. Winter’s story is a reminder of what aquariums are for at their best.

10. Zoo (2017)

This underrated British film, set in Belfast during the Second World War, tells the true story of the Barbary lion Sheila, the last surviving animal at Belfast Zoo in 1941 after German bombing raids destroyed much of the city. A young boy named Tom and his family shelter and care for Sheila in their home, hiding her from authorities and German forces alike.

Zoo is a quieter, more intimate film than most on this list, and it is the better for it. The relationship between Tom and Sheila is handled with restraint and warmth, and the wartime Belfast setting gives the story a gravity and specificity that lifts it above the typical family animal film. It is little-known outside the UK and Ireland and deserves a significantly wider audience.

Honourable Mentions

The animal film landscape is rich enough that several excellent choices did not make the main list. Aquamarine (2006) is a charming teen comedy set around a beach aquarium that has maintained a devoted following. Dumbo, in both its 1941 original and 2019 remake forms, is fundamentally a circus film but shares the captive animal themes that run through so much zoo and aquarium cinema. And the BBC’s Blue Planet series, while not a film, is the definitive audiovisual celebration of the ocean world that aquariums work to protect, and no National Zoo and Aquarium Month is complete without at least one episode.

What Zoos and Aquariums Mean to Cinema

The reason zoos and aquariums appear in so many different kinds of films is that they are inherently dramatic spaces. They are places where the boundary between the human world and the animal one is deliberately made thin. They are environments where wild things are contained, where children press their faces against glass to meet creatures they would never otherwise encounter, where the question of what we owe to other species becomes impossible to avoid.

Films set in these environments inherit all of that drama automatically. Whether they use it for comedy, adventure, emotional storytelling, or advocacy, they are all working with the same fundamental material: the extraordinary, complicated, beautiful relationship between human beings and the other animals they share a planet with.

National Zoo and Aquarium Month exists to celebrate and support the institutions that maintain that connection. These films are its perfect companion.

Which zoo or aquarium film is closest to your heart? Tell us in the comments, and let us know if there is a film we should have included.