This study analyzed the vocabulary levels of English animated movies and compared the vocabulary in the movies with the vocabulary list in the 2022 Korean national curriculum for English. The study focused on the ten most popular movies released in South Korea over the past decade. The analysis revealed that 90.54% of the total vocabulary in these movies appear in the top 1,000-word families from the BNC/COCA 25,000-word list. While it was found that elementary school students would struggle to independently understand the content of the movies, learners who had mastered the secondary common core vocabulary could comprehend the movies on their own. Vocabulary levels and the coverage of the curriculum-recommended vocabulary varied across the movies. Therefore, these findings suggest that learners should select movies that align with their vocabulary level and learning objectives to maximize learning outcomes.