The best anime movies of all time, ranked

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland shot through with revealing economic anxieties, Hayao Miyazaki’s smash hit—the most commercially successful movie (animated or otherwise) in Japanese history—is dense enough to fuel a dozen dissertations. Thankfully, it’s also a blast: warm, witty and wild.

Released in the U.S. in 1993, this instant animation classic about two sisters and their adventures with a goofy-looking forest spirit is the most kid-friendly Studio Ghibli film, as well as one of the most beautiful.

In terms of influence, there may be no more important film in anime history than writer-director Katsuhiro Otomo’s adaptation of his own manga – it might even be the most significant non-Disney animated film of the ’80s. Set three decades after Tokyo was leveled by a nuclear bomb, the story follows the leader of a biker gang on a rescue mission to save his best friend from a government experiment. Coupled with the mind-blowing, post-apocalyptic imagery, it hooked an entire generation of Western audiences to the wonders of Japanese anime, and continues to serve as the genre’s most popular gateway. 

One of the best-known Ghibli films, this somber drama examines the aftermath of WWII, following the plight of two orphaned kids seeking their family and a meal.

Weird, fantastical creatures abound in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated worlds, and whenever this film’s intrepid hero is battling a wild boar or trekking through a whimsical forest, it’s impossible to be anything but agog.

Three homeless people find an abandoned baby wanted by yakuza, and vow to protect her by any means necessary. Satoshi Kon’s tribute to John Ford’s 3 Godfathers was a departure from his usual psychedelic kitchen-sink aesthetic, and is easily his most accessible film.

Years before Harry Potter, Studio Ghibli turned out this immensely lovable tale of a young girl who leaves home to train for a life in witchery, talking black cat in tow, which ended up the biggest Japanese movie of 1989. Existing on the more lighthearted end of the studio’s filmography, it stands with My Neighbor Totoro as the best way to introduce kids to Ghibli’s wonderous world – and anime on the whole. The Eiko Kadono novel on which it’s based is pretty delightful too. 

An office worker traveling to the countryside reflects upon her childhood. What, no giant killer robots or anything?

When a device that allows scientists to root around in their patients’ subconscious falls into the wrong hands, dream detective Atsuko Chiba, AKA ‘Paprika’, must race to get it back. Where Tokyo Godfathers marked a departure from the psychedelic freakouts Satoshi Kon is known for, Paprika found him back in his trippy wheelhouse. It could be his defining work. 

A decorated WWI pilot finds his head transformed into that of a pig in this truly bizarre cartoon. You’ve gotta hand it to the Japanese—they don’t just make the same damn film over and over.

It’s raccoons against humans—actually, raccoons disguised as humans against humans—in this wacky battle for the forests outside Tokyo. Jeez, not another metamorphosing-raccoon flick, for crissakes!

Best leave the young ones at home—Mamoru Oshii’s cyberthriller (one of the few anime features to get a wide theatrical release in the U.S.) features gore aplenty. Adults will find existential questions à la Blade Runner and other sci-fi dystopias.

Flying ships, airborne pirates, damsels in distress and government agents fighting the good fight—no offense, Jude Law, but this is how to do the whole sky captain thing right.

The environmentally conscious plot of this early Hayao Miyazaki favorite involves a young girl trying to bring peace to her post-apocalyptic society and halt the spread of polluted wastelands.

Well, perfect may be stretching it. But anime fans swear by this thriller-cum-philosophical-treatise, in which ruminations about the nature of reality offer an excuse to indulge in a bit of the old animated ultraviolence.

A stunning quick-hit anthology film comprising three shorts from three of Japan’s brightest anime talents of the ’80s - Rintaro, Yoshiaki Kawajiri and Katsuhiro Ôtomo - Neo-Tokyo packs a lot into its 50-minute running time. The best of the three is Ôtomo’s ‘Construction Cancellation Order’, about a white-collar worker attempting to shut down the construction of a factory in a remote part of South America who runs afoul of the robots programmed to complete the job by any means necessary.

A documentarian tries to uncover the reasons why a famed actress disappeared from the spotlight 30 years earlier. Yes, it doesn't quite sound like an animated film, so prepare to have your mind blown.

The title contains multitudes. On an unusually rainy night in Tokyo, a high-school freshman runs away from home and meets a young girl with the ability to control the weather. A brilliant confirmation of the visual and narrative talents of fast rising writer-director Makoto Shinkai. 

It took Katsuhiro Ôtomo 16 years to follow up the genre-defining Akira, but he made the wait worth it. A sweeping steampunk epic, Steamboy was one of the most expensive and laborious anime films ever at the time of its release, requiring more than 180,000 drawings to tell the story of a young inventor in 19th century England on the run from powerful enemies.  

Hayao Miyazaki’s final film before entering ‘retirement’ – he’d come out of it only four years later – is a fantastical biography of the creator of Japan’s World War II-era Zero fighter plane, which Miyazaki presents as a poignant allegory for what happens when reality corrupts one’s dreams. 

This 1970s psychological horror from Eiichi Yamamoto involves tricky and upsetting subject matter, dealing with a newlywed taking revenge on her rapists by making a deal with the devil. But it also has a one of a kind look, using dazzling watercolours to tell its disquieting fable about entrenched patriarchy and loss of bodily autonomy.

The cinematic culmination of the TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion is storied for its abrasiveness. Where the series finale sought more peaceful emotional resolution for its troubled cast, The End of Evangelion drags them all kicking and screaming to the end of the world in a stunning mixture of breathtaking giant-robot action and painful introspection while also playing with cinematic perspective: a later sequence cuts to footage of one of the first audiences to see the film itself.

A beautiful and often heartbreaking story of parenthood, Wolf Children follows a single mother as she raises two boys fathered by a werewolf who dies not long after their birth. It’s perhaps the quietest of Mamoru Hosoda’s family dramas, all of which have taken on some sort of fantastical dimension. The best parts of Wolf Children, however, come not from sweeping fantasy but its portrayal of the everyday agonies and joys of motherhood. 

The procedural storytelling of the Patlabor mecha franchise comes to a head in this film sequel, as co-creator Mamoru Oshii, the famed director of Ghost in the Shell, uses its sci-fi theatrics as a route into a surprisingly granular political story about the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. The result is as gorgeous and captivating as it is contemplative. 

A spin-off of the Kyoto Animation series Sound Euphonium – a drama about girls in a high school orchestra – produced by the same studio and directed by the incredible Naoko Yamada, Liz and the Blue Bird zooms in on two side characters and the intense, rather one-sided relationship between them, culminating in what must be the best animated musical sequence of the decade. 

Masaaki Yuasa has made some of the wildest and most expressive animation in television and film, approaching the medium with an exciting visual flexibility that has become his signature. His hallucinatory feature directorial debut is exemplary of his willingness to experiment, and remains one of his very best - a psychedelic adventure that at one point ends up at a dance sequence in the belly of a whale. 

This film, a retelling of the Macross anime series, sees humanity escape into space on the gigantic Super Dimension Fortress Macross, a contained metropolis complete with pop culture and defended by jets that transform into robots. A star-crossed pilot falls in love with a pop star, and their relationship intertwines with the fate of humanity and the aliens that destroyed Earth. The Macross franchise - notoriously re-edited into “Robotech” in the States - is rather difficult to get ahold of. But should you ever have the chance to watch Do You Remember Love, make sure to leap at the opportunity.

Clocking in at just an hour but packing a lifetime worth of emotion, Look Back is a recent tear-jerker soon to be adapted into a live-action remake by Japanese maestro Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters). The coming-of-age drama follows the friendship between two girls with a passion for drawing comics. One is an outgoing achiever driven by a sense of competition, the other is an introverted recluse. But when a tragedy ends their friendship, a timeline-hopping quest for catharsis follows. Bonus fact: The title is inspired by Oasis’s all-time sing-along anthem ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’. 

Before delivering fantastical teen films like Suzume and Weathering With You, anime auteur Makoto Shinkai received global acclaim with this 2016 breakout. Much like Shinkai’s other hits, Your Name is a disaster drama driven by likeable, morally complex teens. On the surface, the film is a body-swap comedy in the mould of Freaky Friday, complete with laugh-out-loud moments when the central characters wake up and adjust to their different bodies. But as a larger cosmic plot unravels, the film taps into the after-effects of natural disasters and the loss of juvenile innocence. It’s an essential anime for both beginners and genre veterans alike.

For an improvisation-heavy genre like jazz, a surreal anime film seems like the perfect cinematic treatment to capture the dreamy, fluid nature of the music. Saxophone-playing protagonist Dai Miyamoto and his band members charter new galaxies as they immerse themselves in sweat-soaked musical ecstasy. Blend the ambitious verve of Whiplash with the spacey visuals of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and the hypersensory joyride you’ll receive will be Blue Giant. Pure joy, even for the jazz agnostic.