The best animated movies of all time to add to your watch list

Disney tackles J.M. Barrie’s tale of Neverland and the spirit of childhood.

Directors: Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske

Best quote: ‘But Mother, I don’t want to grow up!’

Defining moment: Peter leads Wendy and her siblings across the London night sky.

Parents, do you know where your children are? Maybe they’re following mischievous spirit Peter Pan past the second star and straight on to Neverland, where kids can be kids to their hearts’ content. The sight of grown men threatening children with cutlasses and even a ticking bomb makes this occasionally uncomfortable viewing today (and its dubious treatment of the crimson-hued Native Americans is hard to forgive). But while definitely from a more innocent age, the comedy still plays: Blustery Captain Hook remains an endearingly fallible bad guy, hotly pursued by an ever-ravenous crocodile, while the vigorous action throughout suggests that the Disney team had one eye on Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes output. It’s somewhat superficial overall, but still the best adaptation of Barrie’s play, perennially unlucky onscreen.

A career-spanning interview of an elderly film star traces a romantic odyssey fusing life and art.

Director: Satoshi Kon

Best quote: ‘It’s the key to the most important thing in life.’

Defining moment: When we first realize Chiyoko’s memories and movies are blurred into one.

Satoshi Kon only directed four features before he died of cancer in 2010 at the young age of 46, and while all of them were incredible, it’s Millennium Actress that best illustrates the tender humanity of his limitless imagination. Framed as an interview with fictional fading movie star Chiyoko Fujiwara and folding itself into her various roles in much the same way as Inception would later dive into dreams, this dazzlingly wistful story of lost love is also a beautiful examination of how movies and memories come to occupy a shared space in our minds.

Hungarian folktales go psychedelic…and then some.

Director: Marcell Jankovics

Best quote: ‘Tell your mother to breast-feed you for another seven years, then you’ll be able to pull out the tree single-handed.’

Defining moment: When an animated film starts with a hallucinogenic birthing scene, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore.

Any director who has written 15 books on folklore takes his ancient legends seriously, and in Magyar maestro Marcell Jankovics’s full-on fable, three princes ignore the king’s warning about ‘the lock which must not be opened.’ All hell (literally) breaks loose, and a white mare goddess spawns three human sons – who subsequently take the fight back to the underworld. An archetypal saga involving daunting trials of endurance, it unfolds in a Day-Glo visual style suggesting Kandinsky’s colorful curves, Matisse’s cutouts and way too many prog-rock album covers. It is unlike anything else in the world, ever, which makes this a must-see, though the sheer brutality with which Treeshaker, Stonecrumbler and Ironrubber press through the pit of Hell and back may make this just a bit too heavy-duty for sensitive younger viewers.

A former J-pop idol’s move into acting triggers psychological meltdown.

Director: Satoshi Kon

Best quote: ‘The Internet? That’s popular at the moment. What is it?’

Defining moment: The sight of Mima’s alter ego skipping in midair from lamppost to lamppost would freak anyone out.

Satoshi Kon’s existential sex thriller has generally appealed to only the most ardent anime fans, but it deserves a wider audience – if only to show off a philosophical ambition rarely seen in animation. Weighty ruminations about the nature of reality versus illusion undergird the circling dance of death between a pop star and a deranged superfan. Critics called Perfect Blue a pretentious excuse to indulge in a bit of the old animated ultraviolence, but its psychosexual lure has proven more durable than anticipated. It feels like a Japanese cousin to Black Swan.

This richly imagined postapocalyptic fantasy is Miyazaki’s first masterpiece.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Best quote: ‘Man and insect cannot live together!’

Defining moment: The glow of the rampaging insects’ hate-filled red eyes lines the horizon.

The environmentally conscious plot of this early Miyazaki favorite involves a young girl trying to bring peace to her post-apocalyptic society and halt the spread of polluted wastelands. Even after the director grew into the ambition of such masterworks as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, there’s still something essential about this one, a film that contains all the familiar Miyazakian elements. Centrally, a thoughtful heroine confronts warmongering forces with compassion. If you’ve got a young Rey in your household, obsessed with The Force Awakens, she’ll love you for introducing her to this similar story.

A couple’s desire for a child inspires a tree stump to come to life – and take over their lives – in this funny absurdist yarn.

Director: Jan Svankmajer

Best quote: ‘He’s our child and we have to stick by him through thick and thin.’

Defining moment: When the baby devours his own father: Svankmajer never lets Freud get the better of him.

The most accomplished feature-length effort to date from renowned Czech animator Svankmajer – best known for his brilliantly surrealistic short films – Little Otik explores the dark side of parenthood with a disturbing dream logic equaled only by David Lynch’s supremely creepy Eraserhead. Shot mostly in arrestingly precise live action, Little Otik functions both as a fantastical evocation of pseudocyesis (in which women who are infertile develop psychosomatic symptoms, including a swollen abdomen) and as a hilariously chilling metaphor for the voracious appetite, both physical and psychic, of a newborn child. In this case, that child is a tree stump.

A cosmic journey through time, space and spirituality. With cats.

Directors: Gisaburo Sugii and Arlen Tarlofsky

Best quote: ‘I’m going to be just like that scorpion…’

Defining moment: An old woman sings ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ in the most cracked and haunting voice imaginable.

Kenji Miyazawa’s 1927 novel is a standard text for Japanese schoolchildren but remains virtually unknown elsewhere. Combining eerie Christian mysticism, awestruck pseudoscience and bleak realism, the book follows two put-upon schoolboys, Giovanni and Campanella, as they board the titular train to the stars and beyond. Anime directors Gisaburo Sugii and Arlen Tarlofsky made one major change when they adapted Miyazawa’s work for the screen: They replaced all the central human characters with cute anthropomorphized kittens. But if their intention was to make the story more appealing to youngsters, they were way off. With its meditative pace, unstructured plotting, and rambling, often incomprehensible discourses on morality and mortality, this is about as kid-friendly as a morning in church. For those with patience, however, it is a beautiful, frequently enlightening trip.

 A West African village folktale pits a plucky tot against a fearsome magician.

Director: Michel Ocelot

Best quote: ‘Why are you mean and evil?’

Defining moment: Any time Kirikou’s tiny legs scamper across the savannah.

A multicultural mix of African folklore and European artistic sensibilities, this tiny animated gem follows a mythical baby who ‘has willed himself from his mother’s womb’ (ouch!) to fight a wicked witch. Even more impressively, the story can be read by adults as a political metaphor for modern African strife, while the kiddies thrill to the exploits of a defiant pint-size hero with a badass stare. And honestly, the sorceress is pretty cool, too. Eat your heart out, Disney.

Part art piece, part gross-out comedy, part apocalyptic epic, all indescribable.

Director: Phil Mulloy

Best quote: ‘That villain’s penis is huge!’

Defining moment: When our hero Mr. Christie accidentally kills God. Well, He was disguised as a spider.

How’s this for a plot synopsis? After being seduced by a studly French sailor, straitlaced upper-middle-class father, husband and unwitting reality-TV star Mr. Christie goes insane and decides to dig a hole to Australia in the garden. Emerging in the Tokyo subway system by mistake, Mr. Christie inadvertently murders God and is exiled to the land of the dead, where he meets Adolf Hitler, Jesus and Dracula. Sadly, just as he’s starting to get a handle on things, the local parish priest decides to rape Mrs. Christie, leading to the destruction of the universe. Part of artist and animator Phil Mulloy’s ongoing Christie series (which has so far consisted of 12 shorts and two features, with another in the pipeline), Goodbye Mr. Christie utilizes ultraminimalist animation, computer-modulated deadpan voices and a dry, mordant wit to create something that is at once enlightening, aggravating, strangely moving and extremely funny.

A French children’s publishing phenomenon is brought to handmade life in this story of friendship across species.

Directors: Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar and Benjamin Renner

Best quote: ‘If you don’t eat me, I’ll give you whatever you most want in the world.’

Defining moment: Parallel court cases above and below ground, as Ernest and Celestine try their best to end bear-mouse apartheid.

Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar came to prominence with the deliciously absurd, aptly titled A Town Called Panic, to which this more conventionally visualized heart-warmer seems positively Disneyesque by comparison – if Disney made off-kilter political allegories involving bohemian bears and tooth-collecting mice on the fringes of society, all rendered in delicate watercolor tones. A dark-horse Oscar nominee in 2014, this adorable oddity was big in France, but has yet to find the English-speaking audience it deserves; perhaps a new Forest Whitaker–featuring dub will make the difference. In its current form, however, it’s as pretty and as quintessentially Gallic as a plate of pastel-colored macarons, though with a sharper bite than you might expect.

A road-trip comedy for the online generation.

Directors: Michael Rianda, Jeff Rowe

Best quote: ‘I’m here to bust criminals and lick my own butt… and I’m all out of criminals.’

Definitive moment: The Rick Mitchell maneuver. 

At once a classic road-trip comedy in the tradition of Vacation and a visual feast, this Netflix adventure is perhaps the first film that truly understands the digital lives of Gen-Z. With comedic ringers like Abbi Jacobson, Maya Rudolph and Danny McBride leading a stacked voice cast, Mitchells manages a tremendously high ratio of laughs in its rat-a-tat dialogue and non-stop sight gags. But even were you to strip the film of its techno-thriller narrative about a machine apocalypse enslaving mankind, it would still work beautifully as comedy of cross-generational conflict. That the sci-fi narrative works so well to supplement its beating human heart elevates Mitchells to the same storied tier as Pixar’s very best. 

This compilation of classic Looney Tunes cartoons deserves to be far better known.

Directors: Chuck Jones and Phil Monroe

Best quote: ‘Duck season! Wabbit season! Duck season! Wabbit season!’

Defining moment: Too many to choose from, but the Wagner-inspired ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’ will make your jaw drop.

The only conceivable reason why this roundup of the best Warner Bros. shorts isn’t higher on this list is because so few are aware of its existence. Released briefly into theaters in 1979, the film opens with Bugs Bunny in scholarly mode, looking back over the history of the chase movie from the earliest silents to the present day. Cue a cavalcade of some of the most insanely inventive, vigorously intelligent, wildly subversive and mind-bendingly bizarre skits and spoofs ever seen on film. The highlights are now part of our culture: Elmer Fudd going toe-to-toe with Bugs in ‘Rabbit Fire’; Daffy Duck berating his own animator in the dizzying ‘Duck Amuck’; the surly appearance of Marvin the Martian in ‘Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century.’ But where else can you find them all in one place? We don’t use the word genius lightly, but this qualifies.

Jonathan Swift is adapted in the first feature from Disney’s closest rivals.

Director: Dave Fleischer

Best quote: ‘There’s a g-g-giant on the b-b-beach!’

Defining moment: Lilliputian ingenuity and effort transport their new arrival back to the royal castle.

The achievements of the Fleischer brothers (director Dave and producer Max) have long been overshadowed by Walt Disney, yet they invented many key animation techniques, brought sound to the medium, and found wide audiences for their Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman shorts. Still, Disney’s 1937 Snow White was a game-changer, and the Fleischers responded with their own animated feature, which took the more family-friendly elements from Swift’s caustic original and delivered an upbeat story in which shipwrecked sailor Gulliver intervenes in the senseless conflict between tiny rival nations over the music at a forthcoming royal wedding. The operetta-influenced warbling hasn’t worn especially well, and the knockabout comedy lacks subtlety, yet the thought-through detail with which the Fleischers imagine Lilliput’s micro fixtures and fittings still impresses. A worthwhile reminder that Disney didn’t have it all its way.

The world’s first feature-length stop-motion animation…and one of the greatest.

Directors: Irene Starewicz and Wladyslaw Starewicz

Best quote: ‘Sir, I demand compensation for a cold, a nervous breakdown and some stolen hams.’

Defining moment: The silver-tongued, rascally fox talks his way out of the hangman’s noose.

Stop-motion-animation aficionados should seek out this rare Polish work about a sly fox who outwits everyone around him (you can see it in full on YouTube). It’s been name-checked in recent years by none other than Wes Anderson, who called it a primary influence on his Fantastic Mr. Fox. That makes sense: Even though our hero is a bit of a Clooney-esque scoundrel, you end up loving him.

Thrilling adventure, as an archetypal Miyazaki heroine seeks a mythic lost city somewhere above the clouds.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Best quote: ‘The crystal should remind us that we come from the earth and to the earth we must return.’

Defining moment: The destructive power of a giant robot signals the ominous threat of Laputan technology.

Also known as Laputa, after the hidden city in which the eponymous fortress is located, this was the first true Studio Ghibli feature, and one of the few to receive even a token theatrical release in the United States. Miyakaki’s deeper stories are still to come on this list, but the aerial dogfights of this film remain marvelous. Castle in the Sky has a symbolic value, introducing Westerners to the glories of anime two years before Akira kicked open the door for good.

Lewis Carroll is brought to the screen the Disney way.

Directors: Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske

Best quote: ‘If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t.’

Defining moment: Alice disappearing down the rabbit hole is only the beginning of the weirdness.

Walt Disney had long had his eyes on adapting Lewis Carroll, and when he did so, the results were faithful enough to qualify as one of the studio’s strangest offerings. Evoking the books’ original John Tenniel illustrations but with more than a touch of Disney cuteness, the film as a whole is in thrall to Carroll’s singular visual imagination and his play with language. But it doesn’t quite know how to turn dotty schoolgirl Alice’s episodic odyssey following the white rabbit into anything resembling a satisfying story. One can only imagine what apple-pie audiences thought of it at the time, besieged by hookah-puffing caterpillars, hallucinogenic mushrooms, the Mad Hatter’s tea party and an evidently psychotic Queen of Hearts. It was subsequently a late-night favorite among the herbally assisted.

Anime’s international breakthrough, probing the dystopia of an all-engulfing network.

Director: Mamoru Oshii

Best quote: ‘I am a living, thinking entity who was created in the sea of information.’

Defining moment: Our security-agent heroine pulls the connectors from her neck and we realize she’s a cyborg.

Few films, animated or otherwise, have ever been more ahead of their time than Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, the iconic Japanese anime that anticipated everything from The Matrix and Avatar to Internet culture. A ridiculously dense technothriller set in 2029, the movie introduces a world where cybernetic bodies are commonplace, and hackers are able to remotely take control of the people inside them. Following an assault team as they track the elusive Puppet Master, the movie starts as a slick action film but soon evolves into a prophetic look at the fluidity of identity in the modern world.

Samurai, stop-motion style.

Director: Travis Knight

Best quote: ‘If you must blink, do it now.’

Defining moment: The battle in the Hall of Bones.

Laika’s high-water mark – and the high-water mark of stop-motion’s storytelling capabilities – is a ripping adventure steeped in Japanese lore. Kubo fully realises the tactile, dreamlike animation technique in all its immersive glory, offering up a hero’s journey through Eastern mythology that plays out like a top-tier action yarn, one populated with gargantuan skeletons, ghostly apparitions and white-knuckle swordplay. It’s hard to ignore the whitewashing on screen – casting Matthew McConaughey, Charlize Theron and Ralph Fiennes looks great on a poster, not so much when you note that they’re playing Japanese characters – but it’s equally difficult to deny the master craftsmanship on screen as the hero hops from one eye-popping trial to the next.

The easiest and breeziest of all the classic Disney cartoons.

Director: Wolfgang Reitherman

Best quote: ‘Oh, he’s so handsome… just like his reward posters.’

Defining moment: The opening tune sung by ‘King of the Road’ balladeer Roger Miller sets the scene perfectly, with laid-back country charm and wheezy gags.

Disney may be infamous for manhandling the world’s finest folktales into moralistic all-American parables (see also The Sword in the Stone, Aladdin, Mulan, etc.), but there are times when it really works. Robin Hood is a fine example: The Jungle Book director Wolfgang Reitherman’s decision to transplant hokey, cowpokey Western movie tropes to Ye Olde England should have led to disaster, but the resulting film is so sweet-natured, so casual, so doggone friendly that it becomes impossible to resist. The minuscule budget meant that entire sequences and characters were lifted wholesale from earlier Disney hits (just think of Little John as a brown Baloo), but somehow this only adds to the film’s unpretentious, shaggy-dog charm.

A mockingbird conspires to bring down a despotic king in this seminal futuristic fairy tale.

Director: Paul Grimault

Best quote: ‘Attention: A charming shepherdess and a worthless little chimney sweep are being hunted by His Majesty the King’s police.’

Defining moment: A giant robot under the mockingbird’s control frees a young chicken from its cage, before smashing said cage with its fist.

No less an authority than Hayao Miyazaki has claimed that this French adaptation of a Hans Christian Andersen tale has been a major influence on a generation of animators. We trust Miyazaki-san’s taste and judgment; you should too. Imagine Disney-style talking animals juxtaposed against weird science fiction, the arrogance of royalty and Bavarian imagery, and you’ll get a whiff of the joint this film lights up for you.

Peter Jackson was only 17 when a brave filmmaker tackled Tolkien.

Director: Ralph Bakshi

Best quote: ‘My precious…’

Defining moment: The attack at the ford by Rotoscoped Black Riders is truly unnerving.

In the hindsight given to us by Peter Jackson’s sterling live-action trilogy, it’s easy – though perhaps unfair – to say that this earlier attempt is a lesson in how not to adapt Tolkien’s trilogy for the silver screen. Truthfully, Bakshi’s animated version gets a lot wrong, and also abruptly stops midway through the narrative. (To quote Annie Hall: ‘The food here is terrible – and such small portions!’). But even with its limitations, this version of Middle-earth was the first one experienced by many young viewers, who became full-throated fans of fantasy. And for that alone, Bakshi has done honorable service.

A gleefully bizarre twist on the Faust story that blends live-action with puppetry, stop-motion animation and more.

Director: Jan Svankmajer

Best quote: ‘How comes it then that thou art now out of hell with me?’

Defining moment: The scene showing a baby’s rapid journey through childhood and adulthood to death is Svankmajer’s Claymation at its best.

Svankmajer’s shorts tend to be more effective than his feature-length works, but this inventive pastiche of Goethe’s classic tale is the exception, combining stop-motion animation and live action in breathtaking fashion. It’s got the devilish naughtiness of the best music videos, as a nondescript man emerges from a Prague subway to receive a mysterious map with an X on it. He goes to the secret spot, where de descends into a maelstrom of spells, alchemy and every technique known to modern animation.

A gizmo that records people’s dreams goes missing, resulting in chaos.

Director: Satoshi Kon

Best quote: ‘Isn’t it wonderful to see inside a friend’s dream as if it were your own?’

Defining moment: The opening scene moves from a surreal chase sequence to playback of the same dream images now stored on computer.

Kon’s anime is a cross between Hello Kitty and Philip K. Dick, and yes, we mean that as a very good thing. The director would die from cancer only four years later at the premature age of 46. But at least judging on the evidence of this phantasmagoric final feature, he went out with a bang. Don’t go in expecting it to make sense. Just ride the dream logic like you did with Inception, and you’ll enjoy where you end up, a place of professional dream capturers (using tech called a DC Mini), giant robots and a psycho-cutie Japanese doll.

A grubby New York City, a murderous cast of characters and plenty of off-color jokes – Walt would not approve.

Director: Ralph Bakshi

Best quote: ‘Now listen here, boy: As long as Carole’s got this here good thing [Slaps own butt] and this here left [Taps head], she don’t need anything else unless she wants it – and child, I don’t want it!’

Defining moment: A Mafia boss slurps up a forkful of pasta, out of which tiny, helpless figures fall, shaken from the strands.

‘It’s animated, but it’s not a cartoon,’ promised the trailer, yet the movie that followed, in scummy NYC theaters in August 1973, didn’t fulfill that pledge. Ralph Bakshi’s passion project, a swirling java of urban stereotypes (the overbearing Jewish mother, the Italian mobster, the sassy black girlfriend, etc.), is overstated in a garish, ethnically broad way, very much a cartoon. No matter: There was nothing like it at the time. It’s worth noting that potential viewers had to actively be told that animation could deal with adult subjects like crime, violence and poverty. The style is hand-drawn, superimposed over grainy photographs of Brooklyn’s decay. Though much of Heavy Traffic has since dated poorly, it’s closer to the vibe of early Scorsese than any other movie on this list – and it still represents an avenue that’s gone largely unexplored.

A harrowing refugee memoir and Oscar history-maker.

Director: Jonas Poher Rasmussen

Best Quote: ‘Home… it’s someplace safe.’

Defining Moment: When Amin’s migrant boat is loomed over by an ocean liner full of rubber-necking holidaymakers.

Where 2008’s Waltz with Bashir – to which this Danish production is frequently compared – used animation to bring into focus a young soldier’s blurry recollections of war, Flee’s minimalist illustrations give form to memories which, for its subject, remain all too vivid. At the onset of the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan in the 1980s and ’90s, the pseudonymous Amin Nawabi escaped Kabul with his family, going first to Russia, then Copenhagen, where he and director Jonas Poher Rasmussen initially met as teenagers. Reuniting in adulthood, with a tape recorder rolling, Nawabi, now about to marry, unburdens himself of a personal history he’s kept hidden even from his soon-to-be husband. An emotional and stylistic triumph, Flee became the first film in history nominated simultaneously for Best Animated Feature, Documentary Feature and Best International Feature at the Academy Awards.  

A spooky sequel descends even deeper into virtual reality’s underworld.

Director: Mamoru Oshii

Best quote: ‘When dialogue fails, it’s time for violence.’

Defining moment: Our heroes get trapped in an M.C. Escher–like time loop.

Oshii’s futuristic cyberthrillers have made fanboys of the normally silly-proof; it’s hard to fathom why. This entry reheats the same half-baked existential questions of the 1995 original, of Blade Runner and of a zillion other sci-fi dystopias. Still, the animation has a gorgeously bruised, glowing quality that even Ridley Scott could roll with. And who doesn’t get turned on by a tale of malfunctioning sexbots? We still couldn’t tell you precisely who the ghost is, innocent or guilty, but perhaps that’s okay. Start with the first one.

A Hawaiian-shirt-wearing chameleon bullshits his way into becoming sheriff of a Western town – and finds himself way over his little green head.  

Director: Gore Verbinski

Best quote: ‘If this were heaven, we'd be eating Pop-Tarts with Kim Novak.’

Defining moment: An eye-popping canyon chase involving rodents, dive-bombing bats and a bluegrass version of ‘Flight of the Valkyries’.

Cribbing part of its plot from Chinatown, packing the script with references to Sergio Leone and Hunter S Thompson, and featuring a Salvador Dali-inspired dream sequence, Gore Verbinski’s existentialist cartoon Western ain’t exactly for kids, even if that’s still who it’s aimed at. But hey, not every animated movie needs to be Toy Story. Sometimes, it just has to be weird, wild fun. To that end, Rango works for all ages – it just might be the weirdest, wildest animated movie to come from a non-Pixar studio. Sure, the jokes about mammograms and Golden Age Hollywood starlets will whoosh right over wee ones’ heads. But the climatic duel between our heroic lizard (voiced by Johnny Depp) and a gun-toting rattlesnake (a truly menacing Bill Nighy) will leave everyone screaming.

A furry retelling of Hamlet, set on the African savannah.

Directors: Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff

Best quote: ‘A king’s time as ruler rises and falls like the sun.’

Defining moment: Vengeful Scar allows his brother, Mufasa, king of the lions, to fall to his death during a stampede. We know, you’re still not over it.

For a while, it was up for debate which of the three major films of the Disney Renaissance reigns supreme. But in terms of cultural footprint (make that ‘pawprint’), The Lion King has left the biggest mark. No wonder: the story is straight-up Shakespeare; the animation is stunning; young Simba is adorable; and the songs, from Elton John and Tim Rice, are undeniable. You know you still well up when Mufasa dies, cheer Simba returns to claim his throne and can’t get ‘Hakuna Matata’ out of your head, no matter how hard you try to expel it – and no ‘live action’ remake or unnecessary prequel can dilute its impact. 

This thunderous Ghibli romp – part satire, part family adventure, part war ‘documentary’ –is one of the weirdest movies ever made.

Director: Isao Takahata

Best quote: ‘I have no face!’

Defining moment: The scene in which a raccoon transforms his scrotum into a giant sailing ship bound for nirvana. (We know you’re curious.)

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!) You know the cats over at Studio Ghibli are on their own wavelength, but there’s a special delight in discovering that it includes self-inflatable testicular pouches deployed as hot-air balloons. The movie also has a fair amount of human casualty – again, a weird reason for celebration. It’s two hours that simply can’t be compared to anything else.

With great power comes great responsibility… and Spider-Ham.  

Directors: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

Best quote: ‘I was bitten by a radioactive pig.’

Defining moment: Miles Morales’s upside-down leap of faith. 

After years of CG heroes weightlessly ping-ponging across the screen, Sony finally realised the best way to bring comic-book chaos to life is through animation. But nobody could have predicted the kinetic, deliriously funny, colourful, gasp-inducing glee with which Into the Spider-Verse would explode off the screen, pushing the capabilities of computer animation to vertiginous new heights. It finally gave audiences the joys of a Black/Latino Spidey, Miles Morales, unleashing the oddball wonders of Spider-Ham and Nicolas Cage’s Spider-Man Noir while also refreshing the whole great power/great responsibility narrative in surprising ways. It’s not just one of the best comic-book movies of all time: It’s a game-changer for animation, and a hell of a fun ride from start to finish. And the 2023 followup, Across the Spider-Verse, is nearly as impressive.

Disney’s comeback was assured when this lively romp made millions.

Directors: Ron Clements and John Musker

Best quote: ‘Three wishes, to be exact. And ixnay on the wishing for more wishes.’

Defining moment: The first appearance of the genie, voiced by Robin Williams, is a rat-a-tat stand-up routine set to dizzying visuals.

It’s all about Robin Williams as the Genie in this Disney blockbuster about the titular street urchin and his three wishes. See if your little ones are even more baffled by the William F. Buckley Jr. parodies – Aladdin feels more dated than ever. But time has made it a classic and we can’t deny its innovations. This was the first Disney movie to use computer animation in an extended way (with mixed results); these days, Pixar has perfected that technique. And Williams’s constantly riffing character has become a testament to the boisterous spirit of the man, one who bent an entire industry to his mania. Will Smith tried, in the 2019 Guy Ritchie-directed live action remake, but simply couldn't compete.

A tribute to classic Hollywood, aviation and the unlimited possibilities of cinema.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Best quote: ‘I’d rather be a pig than a fascist.’

Defining moment: The climactic duel between Porco and his archnemesis, American air ace Curtis.

A decorated WWI pilot finds his head transformed into that of a pig in this truly bizarre toon. Gotta hand it to the Japanese – they don’t just make the same damn film over and over. It’s hard to pick a weirder Ghibli movie, this one or Pom Poko. Both of them will have you giving animals plenty of respectful distance after you emerge scarred. Porco Rosso isn’t a simple if-pigs-had-wings fantasy: It also contains political wit, old Hollywood nostalgia (especially for the derring-do of Errol Flynn) and a sad wisdom about flying too high.

Disney takes a modern approach to an old-fashioned fairy tale.

Directors: Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck

Best quote: ‘Wait, you got engaged to someone you just met that day?’

Defining moment: Whether you think it’s a feminist belter or reactionary pop drivel, the Oscar-winning song ‘Let It Go’ is a new Disney classic.

Disney can’t have imagined that this reworking of Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale The Snow Queen would be such an astounding success – just as so many parents could never have imagined that the film's songs and dresses would dominate their lives for so long. It's now the highest-grossing animated film of all time and, as of this writing, has a sequel in the works. Why was it so beloved? Hard to say – it's not exactly groundbreaking. Frozen is, however, sweet, witty and gently empowering, with a belting soundtrack, crowned by Idina Menzel singing ‘Let It Go,’ that sells its charm over and over and over. Presumably the troubled sisterly relationship between Anna and Elsa, the latter of whom has dangerous ice-making powers, is part of the emotional pull of the film, as is, surely, the intoxicating powers of their showstopping dresses and hairstyles. Frozen has plenty of well-imagined comic relief too, including Olaf, the singing snowman who foolishly dreams of summer. It's a traditional-looking melodrama with a distinct but subtle modern edge to it.

Never has a party snub had such dire consequences.

Director: Clyde Geronimi

Best quote: ‘Now you shall deal with me, O prince, and all the powers of hell!’

Defining moment: Evil fairy Maleficent turns herself into a fire-breathing dragon and goes to battle.

Inspired by classic tales by both Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, this Disney animated movie was initially a flop at the box office, postponing the company's return to fairytale territory for three decades until 1989's The Little Mermaid. Watching it today as a kids' film, it's striking how truly creepy and terrifying Sleeping Beauty can be, not least when Princess Aurora is led to the fateful spinning wheel by the evil witch Maleficent (much later given her own, live-action incarnation in the form of Angelina Jolie). The final gothic-tinged showdown between the prince and Maleficent (taking the form of a dragon) in the forests and castle of the decaying Forbidden Mountain is both breathtaking and likely to have little children hiding under the furniture for weeks.

The seminal anime series comes to a close with an apocalyptic bang.

Directors: Kazuya Tsurumaki and Hideaki Anno

Best quote: Our protagonist laments, ‘I’m so fucked up.’

Defining moment: This is the way the world ends… to a pop song.

Fans were mightily displeased with the cerebral, action-free conclusion of Hideaki Anno’s anime TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–96), in which humans fight otherworldly ‘angels’ with giant robots. So he went back to the drawing board and came up with this immensely satisfying, theatrically released alternate ending, which increases the orgiastic machine-on-monster violence tenfold while doubling down on the heady philosophical and spiritual allusions. This is a movie that begins with our weak-willed adolescent hero, Shinji, masturbating over the comatose body of his colleague, and climaxes with an end-times free-for-all that mixes Christian symbology, Jewish mysticism, sexual paranoia and teenage angst into a searing apocalyptic stew. In between are sights and sounds you’ll never forget – from Shinji’s horrifying descent into insanity to a live-action sequence that provocatively implicates the audience itself in the madness.

Wonderfully madcap early-1960s experimental piece.

Director: Harry Smith

Best quote: This is all about the imagery. Words are too pedestrian, man.

Defining moment: A machine that allows you to play a game of tennis with a baby.

You gotta figure that if a fella spends 11 years crafting an hour-long movie, it’s gonna be pretty darn dense. Program notes distributed by NYC’s Anthology Film Archives (a producer) have described the film as ‘alchemical,’ while director Harry Smith best characterizes his avant-garde, surrealist approach: ‘The first part depicts the heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. The second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Müller on the day Edward VII dedicated the Great Sewer of London.’ Got that?

The best film Mikio Naruse never made.

Director: Isao Takahata

Best quote: ‘So many memories playing in my head like a movie, almost overpowering me.’

Defining moment: A ’60s Tokyo family tucking into a whole pineapple becomes a metaphor for life’s promises and disappointments.

An office worker traveling to the countryside reflects upon her childhood. What, no giant killer robots or floating houses or anything? Isao Takahata’s quiet masterpiece is a key entry point into the serious side of Studio Ghibli – and Japanese anime as a whole, viewed at home as a perfectly legitimate forum for non-fantastical drama. Only Yesterday has all the panache of modern-day animation, but weds it to a sweetly nostalgic tale of growing up. And that proves to be wild enough.

No more little miss shy and retiring, this princess means business.

Directors: Nathan Greno and Byron Howard

Best quote: ‘I’m malicious, mean and scary/My face could curdle dairy.’

Defining moment: Escaping the tower, Rapunzel feels grass under her feet for the first time, and breaks into song (as you would).

The brothers Grimm’s Rapunzel must have presented modern Disney with a bit of a head-scratcher. Long gone are the days when a Disney princess would spend her hours mooning around a tower dreaming of a knight in shining armor to rescue her. So in this version (with Pixar’s John Lasseter executive-producing), gone is the handsome prince, replaced with an egotistical thief, Flynn Ryder. When he first smarms his way upstairs, Rapunzel thwacks him with a frying pan. This sparky princess will do her own escaping, thank you very much, twirling all that hair like a lasso. Tangled has energy and humor in spades. Best are the beasts: Maximus the army horse (on a mission to capture Flynn) and Pascal the chameleon.

A landmark work of British animation, terrifying to kids, and some adults.

Directors: John Halas and Joy Batchelor

Best quote: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’

Defining moment: Utterly corrupted by greed and selfishness, the pigs send Boxer the cart horse to the glue factory (an allegory of Stalin’s betrayal of the proletariat?).

Don’t bother toting the little ones to this impressive animated feature: Though the ending has been altered to make the experience a tad less despairing, Orwell’s biting political satire remains largely intact and it’s a fearsome beast. Of historical note: This was the first feature-length British animated film. Moreover, it was partly funded by the CIA, looking to create some quality propaganda to combat the perceived Communist threat. The film was still taught in schools as late as the 1980s.

An unfilmed Jacques Tati script is realized with gentle wit and piercing melancholy.

Director: Sylvain Chomet

Best quote: Not big on dialogue, but the tears of the broken-down clown in the gutter speak volumes.

Defining moment: When Tatischeff the magician is reduced to doing shopwindow demonstrations.

For a film so delicate and graceful, a surprising amount of controversy continues to swirl around Sylvain Chomet’s nearly silent feature about an aging magician and the young Scottish woman who can’t help but believe in his tricks. The title character is an obvious homage to legendary French filmmaker Jacques Tati, and the story goes that Chomet based the movie on a script that Tati wrote as a private apology to his estranged daughter. Tati may never have intended for The Illusionist to be a love letter to himself (or even made at all), but this gorgeously hand-drawn and ineffably heartbreaking wisp of a movie is so perfect that it feels like it was written just for you.

What happens when a well-groomed cocker spaniel meets the love of her life, a stray mutt from downtown?

Directors: Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske

Best quote: ‘I wonder what the leash-and-collar set does for excitement.’

Defining moment: As if you have to ask: a romantic Italian dinner, a single spaghetti strand and two slurpers.

None of Disney’s animated productions speaks better to that studio’s legendary machine than this one, hatched a full 18 years before its ultimate completion. The story was inspired by an actual dog, Lady, the pet of scenarist Joe Grant (also the cowriter of Dumbo), who began shaping material as early as 1937. In the subsequent decade, several more scripters hacked away at drafts, incorporating their own doggie anecdotes. By the early ’50s, a working story was approved, but technology demanded a wider canvas: This was the first animated film to be crafted in CinemaScope (a far greater headache for draftsmen than you’d imagine). As for that famous ‘spaghetti kiss,’ a now-classic bit of flirtation? Walt almost killed it. Legendary artist Frank Thomas defied his boss and mocked up a rough version that won the day.

A bookish Tokyo schoolgirl ponders her future – and delicately comes of age.

Director: Yoshifumi Kondô

Best quote: ‘It looks like springtime has come for Shizuku at last.’

Defining moment: The heroine’s telling first visit to the creepy-yet-enticing antiques emporium.

A book-happy female junior-high student, a young man whose family is obsessed with music, and a magical cat are but a few of the elements in this difficult-to-summarize, rather whimsical romance. Shame about the gooey title. Tragically, its director, Yoshifumi Kondo, died of a brain aneurism at 47. He was set to succeed the great Hayao Miyazaki and based on this lovely feature (Kondo’s only completed work), it would have been a gloriously inspired reign.

This anime film is a searingly intense mash-up of styles, genres and narrative techniques.

Director: Masaaki Yuasa

Best quote: ‘I was killed! Shot by that creep! Then I was sucked up to heaven.’

Defining moment: Nishi, the protagonist, is murdered and sent into limbo, where he encounters a shape-shifting god who’s preoccupied with grooming himself in front of a mirror.

What starts out as a typical anime fantasy – robots, outrageously large-breasted heroines, sci-fi futurism – veers off the rails into anything-goes territory when the geeky male hero dies. Several arguments with God later, he travels back in time and…well, we won’t ruin it for you. Suffice to say, Mind Fuck might have been a better title. Check it out.

Pixar’s purple patch spawns another monster smash.

Director: Pete Docter

Best quote: ‘There’s nothing more toxic or deadly than a human child.’

Defining moment: The closing credits, as our heroes perform their hastily improvised stage musical ‘Put That Thing Back Where It Came from or So Help Me.’

For a while, it seemed so simple: Pixar was on such a spectacular roll that even something as wildly inventive and eye-slappingly beautiful as Monsters, Inc. could be regarded as just another link in the chain. Only now, following a string of disappointments (including 2013’s forgettable prequel, Monsters University), do we realize how good we had it. Perhaps more than any other Pixar flick, Monsters, Inc. plays havoc with the possibilities of animation, harking back to the golden age of Looney Tunes for its wild, dimension hopping action sequences and wealth of background gags, cramming the screen with color, life and wit. The characterization is equally noteworthy: Director Pete Docter milks every ounce of humor and pathos from his voiceover frontmen Billy Crystal and John Goodman, and the script is packed with memorable one-liners and fuzzy warmth.

Three Japanese vagabonds attempt to find the parents of an abandoned baby during Christmastime.

Directors: Satoshi Kon and Shogo Furuya

Best quote: ‘You peep pretty loud for a chick that can’t even find its own worms.’

Defining moment: The little bundle of joy, miraculously saved after a fall from a skyscraper, yawns in reply.

Three homeless people find an abandoned baby wanted by the yakuza, and vow to protect her by any means necessary. 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. Whether you want something so straightforward from someone so adept at mining the edges of imagination, however, is another story. But the dramatic range of animation continues to expand, always cause for hope.

A modern woman’s breakup is paralleled with a musical retelling of the Ramayana.

Director: Nina Paley

Best quote: ‘Assemble the monkey warriors!’

Defining moment: Sita wonders, ‘Whooooooooo’s that knockin’ at my door?’ in an energetic battle-scene-cum-musical-number.

Comic-strip-writer-turned-animator Nina Paley draws (literally) various parallels between her own experiences traveling through India and the ancient Sanskrit poem Ramayana. The result is an impressively dense combo of mix-and-match toon styles, literary references and plain ol’ ingenuity. The most distinctive turn is giving Sita the voice of Jazz Age singer Annette Hanshaw, whose cheery verve adds a defiant layer to a story normally defined by machismo.

Hard to be a collegian feline in the city? Not really, especially when there’s so much sex and pot to be had.

Director: Ralph Bakshi

Best quote: ‘I’ve fought many a good man, and laid many a good woman.’

Defining moment: Fritz gets handsy in a bathtub with at least three other animals.

It’s not an overstatement to divide the whole of animated cinema into two eras: Before Fritz and After Fritz. Aside from becoming a global sensation (and outgrossing most Disney films up to that point), Ralph Bakshi’s libidinous Greenwich Village romp was a slap in the face to purists who hoped to keep cartoons safe for kids. Notoriously, the film received an X rating (and includes a fair amount of bare-assed rutting), but that pejorative label might have also been due to its director’s overall vision, inspired by Robert Crumb’s countercultural characters and filled with Vietnam War–era surliness. Bakshi cut his teeth at Paramount Pictures and in advertising for clients like Coca-Cola; he was no fool to the realities of commerce. Still, it took someone familiar with the game to break the rules so completely. His triumph is animation’s puberty.

This politically charged family adventure effortlessly transcends its toy-exploiting roots.

Directors: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

Best quote: ‘Everything is awesome!’

Defining moment: When our hero Emmet awakes to find himself in the ‘real’ world.

Can you imagine the raised eyebrows when this one was announced? And can you imagine what would have happened if the filmmakers had ruined the reputation of these most-loved plastic toy bricks? Luckily, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs writer-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller came up with a movie that was confident, strangely moving and loopy. Adding a hint of The Truman Show to their conceit, they give us Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), an everyday builder who's ridiculously chirpy and content (the stupidly catchy ‘Everything is Awesome’ is the key song) and totally unaware that he's a tiny cog in a malevolent corporate machine designed to keep its lowly workers ignorant, useful and disempowered. The film has a cutting streak of satire to it, as well as a stream of sophisticated gags that keep coming. Best of all, the entire thing exists in a world of plasticy brick-ness. The film's final moments have proved divisive, but whatever you make of them, they're no less bold than everything that comes before.

A soulful – and soul-filled – triumph

Director: Lee Unkrich

Best quote: ‘When there’s no one left in the living world who remembers you, you disappear from this world. We call it the Final Death.’

Defining moment: If you don’t well up for Miguel and Mama Coco’s ‘Remember Me’ duet, your soul might be in the land of the dead itself.

Death and remembrance are big themes for kids to wrap their heads around, but Pixar has always trusted the emotional maturity of its young audience, and the reward is the studio’s last true classic, a gorgeous, kinetic celebration of Mexican culture. Young Miguel comes from a tight-knit, multigenerational household, with one major rule: no music. An unplanned trip to the land of the dead – a stunningly rendered dreamworld teeming with singing skeletons, fluorescent jaguars and other magnificent beasts – reveals why. It’s a beautiful, big-hearted movie about how we keep the spirits of our lost loved ones alive. It’s also just a wonderful adventure, hinging on a twist that brings new meaning to the phrase ‘never meet your heroes’.   

Miyazaki’s first feature is an affectionate, fun-filled take on ’60s spy capers.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Best quote: ‘My prize is a treasure locked away in a tower by an evil magician – please allow this humble thief to steal it.’

Defining moment: The dashing hero facing certain death entombed in the baddie’s catacombs.

Created by French writer Maurice Leblanc in 1905, gentleman thief Arsène Lupin later morphed into Rupan, the dashing antihero of a manga. It became a hit TV series and generated master animator Hayao Miyazaki’s very first feature. Fresh from another jewel robbery, Rupan finds himself in the tiny duchy of Cagliostro, hoping to rescue comely Clarisse from marriage to the scheming count who’s usurped the throne. What unfolds is a cavalcade of scrapes and gadgetry, indicating that Miyazaki knew his ’60s celluloid spy capers back to front. The result is undeniably lightweight yet breathlessly entertaining: Plotting is resourceful in its succession of twists and reversals, and the architectural hyperdetail of the castle itself is typical Miyazaki. It’s a delightful movie that sits at a slight remove from the rest of his work.

Animation meets classical music in an Italian-style Fantasia.

Director: Bruno Bozzetto

Best quote: ‘Someone called Disney has already made this?’

Defining moment: Humanity’s evolution scored to Ravel’s Bolero is a magnificent set piece.

Popularly known as the Italian Fantasia, this animated feature is hit and miss, but the chronicle of evolution set to Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ is a truly remarkable achievement, and damn funny. There’s definitely a Monty Python–style antiestablishment surrealism at play here, not least the musical sections, in which we see humanity evolve from the sludge at the bottom of a Coke bottle. And unless we’re forgetting, Fantasia didn’t include live-action behind-the-scenes bickering, shot in black and white.

An animation giant plunders classic kids’ lit for this tale of a resourceful young witch.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Best quote: ‘You’d think they’d never seen a girl and a cat on a broom before.’

Defining moment: The airship disaster is one of the most thrilling sequences in the Ghibli catalog.

One of the best-known anime features apart from Akira, this charming comedy about a teenager who leaves home to try her luck as a witch was Japan’s highest-grossing film of 1989. (In America, that top grosser was Tim Burton’s Batman, as stark a contrast as could be imagined.) In the movie’s wake, teenage witchery would become a huge industry dominated by J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Kiki can’t exactly claim credit for that trend, but it is an early example of turning the magic of spell-casting literature (in this case, an unassuming novel by Eiko Kadono) into popular entertainment.

The madness and futility of war…in animation.

Director: Ari Folman

Best quote: ‘Memory fills the holes with things that never happened.’

Defining moment: The acid-trip opener: An ex-soldier describes a recurring dream of being chased by a pack of 26 ferocious dogs.

Animation is often used to illustrate the impossible (a talking rat, for example), but Ari Folman’s masterpiece takes unique advantage of the medium’s ability to see things that live-action can’t show us. Waltz with Bashir is a film about a uniquely filmic problem: How do you visualize something that’s been forgotten? Recreating real-world testimony with Adobe Flash animation (and a haunting Max Richter score), Folman tries to remember the role he played in a massacre as a young Israeli soldier. What he finds is less important than how he looks for it, but the results of his search are unforgettably devastating all the same.

The calypso-inflected Hans Christian Andersen adaptation that revived the Mouse House’s ailing fortunes.

Directors: John Musker and Ron Clements

Best quote: ‘Somebody’s got to nail that girl’s fins to the floor.’

Defining moment: In the infectious ‘Under the Sea,’ Sebastian the crab attempts to convince wayward Ariel of the merits of ocean living.

Two years later, Beauty and the Beast received more acclaim, but it was this cheery musical adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s bleakly fatalistic fairy tale that redesigned the template of contemporary Disney animation and returned the studio to pop-culture prominence. The formula – take a story everyone knows with a plucky princess, then add a bunch of hip, catchy-as-chlamydia show tunes – still works, as the recent success of Frozen demonstrates. But alongside the witty, verbally intricate contributions of ingenious songsmiths Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, it’s the depth of yearning for other lives and other forms that gives this one emotional resonance and staying power. Well, that and the lasciviously tentacled, Mae West–and–Divine-inspired sea witch Ursula, surely among the greatest Disney villains.

Who needs a caring stepmother when you’ve got glass slippers, an enchanted lifestyle and a hunky Prince Charming at the end of the day?

Directors: Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske

Best quote: ‘A dream is a wish your heart makes when you’re fast asleep.’

Defining moment: A pumpkin and some mice get a magical makeover.

Even today, when you watch a Disney film, the impact of Cinderella can be felt from the very first frame: That iconic castle, the studio’s logo, comes right from this picture. It was the make-or-break gamble that, had it failed, would have meant the end for Walt & Co. Instead, his film’s runaway success allowed him to finance the theme parks and cement his name forever. The elements of the story are bedrock components of the Disney formula: plucky, charming heroine, helpful sidekick animals, the promise of total transformation. Yet there was innovation here, too; musical numbers would, for the first time, be commissed out to Tin Pan Alley experts, while live-action footage was shot as a model for most scenes.

A wise, funny Claymation tale of lives lived on the edge of society.

Director: Adam Elliot

Best quote: ‘Butts are bad because they wash out to sea, and fish smoke them and become nicotine-dependent.’

Defining moment: Max wins the lottery and uses his prize money to buy a lifetime supply of chocolate.

This Claymation feature observes the letter-writing relationship between Mary Dinkle, a chubby, lonely eight-year-old girl in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max Horovitz, a severely obese, Jewish 44-year-old New Yorker with Asperger’s syndrome. Say all that five times fast. More importantly, see it. It’ll convince you that animation can contain a universe of comic variety, from overbearing-mom jokes to pugnacious outsider resiliency. Philip Seymour Hoffman voices Max, movingly.

Threatened farm animals seek the help of super-smart experimental rodents from a lab.

Director: Don Bluth

Best quote: ‘We can no longer live as rats. We know too much.’

Defining moment: The fearsome, golden-eyed Great Owl smashes a spider, chomps on a moth – and offers some sage advice.

A very smart film for kids (and a less-than-escapist one for parents), this animated masterpiece plays off the sad premise of lab rats made superintelligent by experimental drugs. Director Don Bluth led the exodus away from Disney in 1980 when he felt that the company was abandoning its attention to detail for cheaper production methods. NIMH is Bluth’s defiant, richly adorned response. It also features the scariest owl ever committed to film.

Pixar’s fantastic voyage into the mind brings all the feels.

Director: Pete Docter and Ronnie Del Carmen

Best quote: ‘Take her to the moon for me. Okay?’

Defining moment: The early, stakes-raising collapse of Goofball Island.

Inside Out feels like a dare: Here is Pixar, known trafficker of emotional manipulation, creating an entire universe of anthropomorphic feelings set within the mind of a child on the cusp of adolescence. Yet what pushes Inside Out to masterpiece status is the way its creators craft their fantastic voyage into the mind, allowing sentient emotions like Joy and Sadness to ebb and flow. Children will find lessons in emotional management and the importance of sorrow. Parents will find solace in the universality of embracing a child’s whirligig emotional shifts. And anyone with a pulse will find themselves enraptured in the full spectrum of emotions being brought vividly to life. The 2024 sequel is a worthy followup — and the highest-grossing animated film ever released — but it doesn't hit with the surprise of the original.  

An elderly British couple thinks it can survive a nuclear attack with Blitz-era gumption.

Director: Jimmy T. Murakami

Best quote: ‘There’s no need to forget your manners just because there’s a war on.’

Defining moment: Surveying their destroyed kitchen, the couple brews a cup of tea and baffles over their silenced TV.

A sick joke on paper, this devastating domestic drama today feels like one of the more honest works of the anti-nuke movement. It’s a complete and utter downer, making a larger point subtly through the employment of animation itself: Such an adorably hand-drawn universe is too precious to last in a world of mutually assured destruction. We’re all living in a cartoon if we actually believe survival is possible when the radiation headaches mount and your hair starts failing out in tufts. (Heartbreakingly, the husband assures his wife that women don’t go bald – a ‘scientific fact.’) Big-name pop stars lent their music to the cause, including Roger Waters, Squeeze and David Bowie, who crooned the soulful, undanceable title track. If you haven’t seen this one, that’s totally understandable; it makes The Day After look like a gentle summer shower.

Conversations swirl in a treatise on the need to stay curious.

Director: Richard Linklater

Best quote: ‘Are you a dreamer? I haven’t seen too many around lately.’

Defining moment: Floppy-haired Wiley Wiggins floats high above his suburban neighborhood, a black shape against the blue sky.

Trippiness of a highly verbal nature wasn’t unexpected from the director of Slacker and Dazed and Confused. Still, Richard Linklater’s hypnotic plunge into rotoscoping proved a litmus test even for his fans: You either let the flow of cosmic ideas sweep you up in a stimulating rush or you checked out somewhere. In either case, the filmmaker’s creativity was undeniable. Friends morph into banks of fluffy, chatting clouds; flirters launch words like love into earholes. Amateur philosophizing was never so well-supported or flattered by its form. Fans of Before Sunrise noticed Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke lounging in bed (a hint of two sequels yet to come). Yet for the most part, all footholds evaporated. Waking Life was – and still is – a surreal invitation to cut loose.

A one-man, multidiscipline labor of love.

Director: Chris Sullivan

Best quote: ‘I do not suggest using ashes as fertilizer – these bitter urns of charred memories soak into the soil and leave a blackened taste on the lips.’

Defining moment: A scratchy, pencil-sketch scene of loss, as the authorities come to take away little Lydia and Victor Blue.

Surely the most obscure film on our list, Consuming Spirits is the result of more than a decade’s work for writer, director, animator, musician and voice artist Chris Sullivan and his small team. Running 136 minutes and encompassing more than 230,000 individual frames, this epic achievement combines cutout, stop-frame and pencil sketches and a beautiful soundtrack steeped in mountain folk. But as with any great animated movie, it’s the emotional content that’s most rewarding. Set in a small Pennsylvania town, this is a poetic, downbeat tale of three characters united by disappointment, alcohol and a haunted past. Thanks to an extremely limited U.S. release, Consuming Spirits is little known even within the animation community, but almost everyone who voted for it here made it their number-one choice.

How the Vikings learned to stop warring and love dragons.

Directors: Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders

Best quote: ‘It’s only fun if you get a scar out of it.’

Defining moment: Pint-size Viking Hiccup meets Toothless, the not-so-scary Night Fury dragon.

Odin almighty! Here’s a kids’ animated film with wit, charm and one-liners. The story is as old as a Nordic longboat: a coming-of-age yarn about a boy with daddy issues. Our hero is Viking pipsqueak Hiccup, raised in a proud nation of dragon slayers. All Hiccup wants is to please his warrior father, Stoick the Vast (who sums up the macho Viking philosophy nicely: ‘When I was a kid, my dad told me to bang my head against a rock – and I did it’). Hiccup’s trouble is that he is the geekiest, weediest Viking in the tribe. But (pay attention, kids) since the brain is mightier than brawn, he learns the ways of the dragons. The film climaxes with a spectacular aerial battle sequence. Meanwhile, Hiccup’s little dragon buddy Toothless is the cutest kitten-bat-lizard crossbreed you’re likely ever to see onscreen.

Have you seen this fish?

Director: Andrew Stanton

Best quote: ‘When life gets you down, you know what you got to do? Just keep swimming.’

Defining moment: Marlin risks his life to save Dory from a jellyfish forest

Maybe it’s not as groundbreaking as Toy Story, or experimental as WALL-E, or high-concept as Inside Out, but Finding Nemo is Pixar’s most epic adventure, an undersea odyssey with individual moments that stack up against anything else the studio has done. When a rebellious clownfish swims away from the safety of their coral reef, his anxiety-riddled father must face his biggest fears and venture across the ocean – through a field of jellyfish, an altercation with a group of semi-reformed sharks and a whale’s stomach – to rescue him. Albert Brooks is perfectly nebbish as the voice of Marlin, Nemo’s sweaty-finned dad, while Ellen DeGeneres spun off her supporting role as a dopey blue tang into a successful starring vehicle, Finding Dory. Kids ate it up: Nemo was, for a time, the highest-grossing animated film ever. And it’s still the best-selling DVD of all-time – a record we now assume will never be broken.

Aardman’s first feature applied their signature style to a tale of farmed chickens trying to break free.

Directors: Peter Lord and Nick Park

Best quote: ‘All my life flashed before my eyes... It was really boring.’

Defining moment: When our feathered friends finally fly a homemade mechanical bird over the fence.

Britain’s Aardman Animations had been going since the early 1970s, and had won three Oscars for its short films ‘Creature Comforts,’ ‘The Wrong Trousers’ and ‘A Close Shave’ (the latter two featuring Wallace and Gromit), by the time that the company’s founder, Peter Lord, and his collaborator Nick Park codirected their first feature, Chicken Run, in 2000. A feathery spin on The Great Escape, the film showcased the same clay animation Aardman had employed to bring the much-loved Morph character to life on British TV in the 1970s and ’80s. Only now their budget was bigger, they were working with DreamWorks and Pathé, and the voices included Mel Gibson as an arrogant American chicken among an ensemble of winged prisoners in Yorkshire desperate to escape a vicious farm and its chicken-pie machine. The Aardman style – amusing, down-to-earth, homey dialogue coupled with simple, oversize features –survived the company’s first brush with Hollywood.

Handcrafted silhouettes captivate in the first-ever animated feature.

Director: Lotte Reiniger

Best quote: It’s silent, so you’ll have to provide your own dialogue.

Defining moment: The good witch takes on the evil sorcerer in a shape-shifting smackdown.

Given the immense visual sophistication of today’s computer-aided animation, is there still any point in watching a silent film where paper cutouts move across illuminated sheets of glass? Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is a resounding yes, since this fairy-tale adventure from Germany’s Lotte Reiniger is no fusty historical artifact, but a mesmerizing viewing experience, precisely because (unlike modern animation) we can see the handiwork involved in creating the exquisite silhouettes peopling this classic Arabian Nights tale. There’s a flying horse, a dashing prince, an evil sorcerer, a damsel in serious distress, and even a special appearance by Aladdin and his ‘wunderlampe.’ It’s all rendered in filigree detail that brings the time-honored story to life. There’s not quite the seamless movement we’ve come to expect these days, but when Reiniger fills the screen with spiky winged demons, the sheer craft on display is genuinely breathtaking.

Pixar scored a hat trick – in 3-D – with the third film of its signature franchise.

Director: Lee Unkrich

Best quote: ‘What are you going to do with these old toys?’

Defining moment: When the toys are threatened with a horrific end at the garbage dump.

It took 11 years for Pixar to make another visit to the playroom. Getting there was a bumpy ride: Development for the third Toy Story film became caught up in the intricacies of the animation studio’s production deal with Disney, and at one point the Mouse House was planning to make the second sequel without Pixar’s involvement. That all changed when Disney bought the studio in 2006, and Pixar took charge of Disney Animation. Much of the original team – including John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, the latter of whom would now direct Toy Story 3 solo – went back to the drawing board and came up with a narrative that saw Andy, the toys’ owner, about to go to college and the toys escaping the terrible fate of the attic and heading instead to a day-care center – which turns out to not be the paradise they’d hoped for. The mix of energy and emotion was as winning as ever.

Romance, music and comedy combine in a latter-day Disney milestone.

Directors: Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale

Best quote: ‘It’s no use. She’s so beautiful. And I’m… well, look at me!’

Defining moment: The camera sweeps through the ballroom as the couple hits the floor.

A Disney Renaissance high point, this ‘tale as old as time’ is as essential to the Mouse House’s rep as Pinocchio or Cinderella. Famously, Beauty and the Beast would be the first animated movie ever to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar – and that’s back in the cutthroat era of five nominees, mind you. But all awards talk aside, the movie is enchanting: exactly how a romantic animated fantasy should feel. You might be able to find tougher versions of the fable (nothing can compare to Jean Cocteau’s 1946 stunner), but there’s great compensation via this batch of original musical numbers, including ‘Be Our Guest,’ ‘Belle’ and the title track. All were created by lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken, the former to whom the movie is dedicated – he died of AIDS complications mere months before the release.

The toys are back in town!

Directors: John Lasseter, with Ash Brannon and Lee Unkrich

Best quote: ‘Woody, you're not a collector's item, you're a child's plaything. You. Are. A. Toy!’ 

Defining moment: The devastating Jessie and Emily montage. Stings every time.  

Initially conceived as a signature Disney straight-to-video cash-in, the first sequel to Pixar’s studio-defining debut feature proved that Buzz, Woody and the gang might just be the millennial Muppets: a cast of colourful characters who’ll never fully leave our lives, and who we’ll always be happy to see pop up every few years, no matter how old we get. (A fifth film in the franchise has been announced, too.) Rescued from that ignominious fate by Pixar head John Lasseter, Toy Story 2 doesn’t just offer more of what we got in the original movie – even if its rescue-mission plot feels familiar – but rather expands the universe and inner lives of Andy’s playthings, fleshing out Woody’s backstory, heightening the emotions, introducing compelling new characters and confronting startlingly mature themes about self-worth, abandonment and letting go. (Seriously, try to get through that Jessie montage without getting a little misty.) Best of all? It remains fun and funny as heck, ultimately hitting a laughs-to-tears ratio that would carry Pixar’s classics still to come.

Disney gets with the ’60s.

Director: Wolfgang Reitherman

Best quote: ‘I’m the king of the swingers / The jungle VIP / I’ve reached the top and had to stop / And that’s what’s botherin’ me.’

Defining moment: King Louie of the Apes and Baloo the Bear’s scat-’n’-dance routine.

Has there ever been a Disney movie with a more memorable, enduring soundtrack? Perhaps we'll still be humming ‘Let It Go’ from Frozen in 40 years time, but until then, numbers like ‘Bare Necessities’ and ‘I Wanna Be Like You’ reign supreme. It helps that those songs have such a groovy home, as if the Disney crew had decamped to Haight-Ashbury to get their inspiration for this loose, hippyish spin on Rudyard Kipling's India-set tales. The Jungle Book has a distinctly 1960s flavor, from the vultures with mop tops and British accents to a snake's tripped-out eyes. And the characters, of course, remain some of Disney's most beloved, topped by Baloo (the Bill Murray of bears). Walt himself passed away during the making of this film; its enormous box-office haul is now credited with rescuing the studio's animation division from the possible jaws of closure.

Pixar pushes the boundaries (again) with a near-wordless tale of robot romance in a dystopian future.

Director: Andrew Stanton

Best quote: ‘Computer, define dancing.’

Defining moment: Wall-E’s increasingly frenzied, love-struck attempts to revive his comatose flame are heartbreaking.

This must remain Pixar's most bold movie to date. Taking its cue from the worst projections imaginable of the environmental destruction of our planet, Wall-E imagines Earth in the year 2805 completely devoid of humans. The only animate object that remains is a rusty old robot designed to collect waste (his name stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth Class). This is a rare popular animated feature that offers a challenging, angry vision of the future. And, moreover, it's almost an experimental movie – for its first 40 minutes or so, we watch in awe as Wall-E goes about his work on Earth in almost complete quiet. It's virtually a silent movie, meaning that the script relies heavily on visual gags, messages and cues. The film's later scenes slightly betray the promise of its first, awe-inspiring half when we move to a frenetic, horrific space station where all the remaining humans now live, but even then the film's vision of man's folly is no less cutting. For all its quiet anger, Wall-E is a romance too, and when, back on Earth, a second robot, Eve, appears, we find ourselves cheering on a nascent union in a way that only Pixar could inspire.

Ancient forests mark the battleground for mankind’s future in this mythical drama set in medieval Japan.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Best quote: ‘My goal is to see with eyes unclouded by hate.’

Defining moment: The first sight of the Deer God, antlers glowing as we glimpse him through the trees.

Like Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind and Laputa: Castle in the Sky, this Miyazaki epic puts ecological concerns at the center of a human power struggle – but a decade on from those earlier films, the director’s worldview had become much more complex. The nascent technology of iron smelting allows for the development of firearms, but also means that forests are felled to fuel the process – forests where the ancient gods still live. Half-human, half-spirit Mononoke embodies the contradictions of change, vowing to protect the woods yet drawn to youthful warrior-tribesman Ashitaka, who’s seeking his own destiny at the heart of this threatened landscape. Unlike the Disney universe, there are no simplistic heroes or villains here, just the steady realization that our bid to master nature will have profound consequences: both our making and our undoing. Muscular, troubling, uncompromising storytelling on a grand scale.

Nothing is child’s play in this vivid, gutsy adaptation of Richard Adams’s novel about a colony of rabbits seeking a new warren.

Director: Martin Rosen

Best quote: ‘All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand Enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you.’

Defining moment: The harrowing apocalyptic vision of young Fiver, which sets the story – and decidedly mature tone – in motion.

Not quite children’s adventure, not quite grown-up epic, rich with classical allusions and biblical allegory, Richard Adams’s unexpectedly popular novel posed something of a challenge to animators: How do you make a creature feature that’s not too cute for adults, and a story of death and displacement that’s not too grim for families? Martin Rosen’s solemn, urgent and exquisitely rendered film strikes just that balance. There are sequences in this riveting survival tale to terrify viewers of any age, many involving General Woundwort, the face that launched a thousand childhood nightmares. But there’s comforting, compassionate sweetness, too (exemplified by Art Garfunkel’s sentimental theme song, ‘Bright Eyes’), all folded into powerful, traditional storytelling. Nobody would dare make anything like it today.

Freed from the constraints of network TV, prepubescent paper-cut terrors go on the rampage.

Director: Trey Parker

Best quote: ‘That movie has warped my fragile little mind.’

Defining moment: ‘Uncle Fucka,’ the foulmouthiest jolly little musical number in animation history.

The Broadway-conquering, Tony-sweeping success of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s stage musical, The Book of Mormon, took many by surprise – but only the sort of people who wouldn’t have touched the South Park movie with a conductor’s baton. If they had, those audiences would have known that the Coloradans were not merely purveyors of taste-baiting trash for sniggering schoolboys, but the slyest, smartest and (yes) most tuneful satirists America had produced since, well, ever. And South Park Bigger Longer & Uncut remains their defining statement, a work combining epic scale (a land war with Canada, a trip to the depths of Hades, a daylight raid on the Baldwin compound) with intimate character comedy (Satan’s grief over his lover Saddam Hussein’s infidelity is genuinely touching), wrapped in a biting commentary on censorship and topped off with belting show tunes worthy of West Side Story.

An Iranian expat remembers her tumultuous childhood during the Islamic revolution.

Directors: Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi

Best quote: ‘Shut up, you bitches! Yes, I’m Iranian, and I’m proud of it!’

Defining moment: Young Marjane talks her way out of a tough spot after buying an Iron Maiden bootleg.

This autobiographical, mostly black-and-white animation looks back on the early life of its creator, the Iranian author and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi. Born in 1969, Satrapi's formative years coincided with radical change in her homeland of Iran, which moved from the rule of the Shah, through the 1979 revolution, to being an Islamic state. Mouthy and awkward as a Tehran student, Satrapi was then sent to school in Vienna, where she discovered music and men and challenged the settled European apathy of classmates who called themselves ‘anarchists.’ Persepolis is politics as personal testimony, touched with the humor and wisdom of hindsight, and it’s full of the dry wit of its storyteller. Visually, the film is beguiling: Satrapi gives us characters drawn in soft monochrome, against the charcoal backgrounds of cities. Although told from an adult's perspective, Persepolis retains a child's-eye view of the world, which perfectly suits the deceptively straightforward style of animation.

The film that makes little kids (and grown adults) cry.

Directors: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, David Hand, Graham Heid, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield and Norman Wright

Best quote: ‘Faster! Faster, Bambi! Don’t look back! Keep running! Keep running!’

Defining moment: Bambi and his mother graze peacefully in a clearing. Her ears prick up. Something’s not right. A gunshot rings out. They run for their lives.

For lots of us, Bambi is so many firsts: the first time we cried in the theater, when… you know when; the first time we realized that really bad things happen to adorably cute deer. In 1942, Walt Disney described Bambi as ‘the best picture I have ever made, and the best ever to come out of Hollywood.’ Today, it still has friends in high places. The Pixar crew are huge fans, arguing that, from boy to buckhood, Bambi contains some of Disney’s most charming animation (Walt set up a small zoo at the studio for his team to study the animals). And in the roll call of Disney supporting actors, Thumper the rabbit is an all-time great. Despite its reputation for being sentimental, the film’s closing scene – Bambi abandons his mate and newborn twin fawns to join his father in the forest – is as un-Disney as it gets.

Disney’s most stylish baddie concocts a devilish plan.

Directors: Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske and Wolfgang Reitherman

Best quote: ‘I live for furs. I worship furs! Is there a woman in all this wretched world who doesn’t?’

Defining moment: The puppies sneak past Cruella De Vil, covered in soot, disguised as black Labradors.

You can accuse Disney of softening a lot of things in the making of their animated tales, but scrimping on villains has never been part of their approach. There are few evil Disney folk as memorable as Cruella de Vil, the fur-coated harridan who sweeps into the home of newly-married Roger and Anita to the sound of a thunderclap and in a cloud of cigarette ash. Cruella, an old friend of too-nice Anita, has heart set on skinning their two dogs’ 99 Dalmatian puppies. Unwittingly, she kickstarts a plot that sees the local animal world rising up to defeat her and her henchmen (and inspiring songwriter Roger to pen a catchy new ditty about his wife's awful, murderous acquaintance). The animation here was simpler than its less-successful Disney predecessor Sleeping Beauty, but the film has a metropolitan charm to it, especially in its depiction of London's suburban streets, houses and parks.

Surreal social commentary in a Gallic animated sci-fi milestone.

Director: René Laloux

Best quote: ‘I was only a tiny toy, but on occasion a toy who dared to rebel.’

Defining moment: A mother runs in terror cradling her child, only to be picked up and flung to the ground by a giant blue hand.

Take the big’uns-versus-little’uns conflict from Gulliver’s Travels, sprinkle with the Blue Meanies from Yellow Submarine, add a political allegory as forceful as Orwell’s 1984 and you’re beginning to grasp this unique combination of Gallic creativity and Czech production expertise. No other animated feature looks like this, since planet Ygam and its weirdly wonderful inhabitants are drawn in a deliberately antique fashion, like some illustrated bestiary from before Columbus set sail. The tiny Homs (think hommes, French for ‘men’) are kept as pets by their otherworldly conquerors, the giant Draags (perhaps drogues, French for ‘drugs’), but they have the spirit and ingenuity to turn the tables on their technologically advanced yet dangerously self-absorbed masters. This definitely prefigures the world of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicäa, even if it lacks his robust storytelling and crisp action. It’s a ’70s landmark all the same.

An oldster saves her kidnapped grandson with the help of three peculiar singers.

Director: Sylvain Chomet

Best quote: ‘Swinging Belleville rendez-vous!’

Defining moment: The Triplets sing their signature tune to a down-and-out Madame Souza.

For his feature debut, French animator and graphic novelist Sylvain Chomet crafted a wondrous, touching homage to the work of the great physical comic Jacques Tati (Playtime). Madame Souza is a devoted grandmother to her cyclist grandson, Champion, whom she trains to compete in the Tour de France. During the race, he is kidnapped by the mob and taken to the city of Belleville for cryptic purposes. Souza follows and befriends three aging music-hall singers, the Triplets, who assist in her quest to save Champion. Dialogue is kept to a bare minimum; you could count the number of spoken sentences on one hand. This frees Chomet to concentrate on the stunning, sublimely grotesque visuals, which play delightfully with perspective and proportion. Two joined-at-the-shoulder henchmen look like a rectangular black block with legs. Champion’s dog, Bruno, is a galumphing blob of jowl and fur. And the Triplets – as good at making music with household appliances as they are at outwitting gun-toting gangsters – seem to expand and contract at will, as if their spines were Slinkys.

Pixar’s saddest, sweetest, strangest film.

Directors: Pete Docter and Bob Peterson

Best quote: ‘Adventure is out there!’

Defining moment: An obvious one – the heartbreaking opening sequence tracking Carl and Ellie through their life together.

It's the brief opening chapter of Up that everyone remembers best, and rightly so – even Pixar and director Pete Docter returned to its model for their later film Inside Out. It's in those few minutes that we race through the life of now-elderly Carl, a widower who once dreamed of becoming an explorer before work and family, love and tragedy, took over. Rarely has popular animation displayed such acute sensitivity to the pattern and flow of real life. From there, we're back to the present day as Carl decides to respond to the authorities who are trying to push him off his property by tying a thousand balloons to his home and floating off, with his house, to find the waterfalls in South America that he and his wife had always dreamed of visiting. The rest of the film is inventive, fast and visually extravagant, even if it doesn't quite reach the imaginative heights of Pixar’s absolute best.

Pixar was at the height of its powers when it made this Paris-set tale of a rat with immense cooking talent.

Directors: Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava

Best quote: ‘In many ways, the work of a critic is easy.’

Defining moment: Food critic Anton Ego tastes Remy’s dish and is plunged into memories of his childhood.

This charming, Paris-set Pixar film from Brad Bird has something of a midcentury Disney air to it in its story of a food-obsessed rat, Remy, who ends up secretly assisting a likable but extremely green newbie chef, Linguini, in a high-class city restaurant. It's a great example (even down to its title, a play on the name of the classic French dish) of Pixar's belief in being able to sweep mass audiences along in popular stories that might sound eccentric but are defined by fascinating characters, true emotions and having something to say about the world around us. Part of this film's charm is the relationship between Remy and Linguini and how it develops to a point where Linguini is forced to remember that his newfound success is entirely founded on the help of his unsung rodent friend. Equally memorable is the character of Anton Ego (Peter O’Toole, in fine voice), a feared, arrogant food critic whose claws retract at the taste of a ratatouille which reminds him of his youth. His subsequent review, a beautiful piece of writing honoring creativity and talent, is surely close to the heart of the Pixar project itself.

Disney busts open a portal to the original multiverse of madness. 

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Best quote: ‘I’m not bad – I’m just drawn that way.’

Defining moment: A quivering cartoon shoe meets its demise via ‘the Dip’ – a legitimately disturbing moment for kids and adults.

‘Groundbreaking’ is often thrown around recklessly in film discussion, but in the case of Robert Zemeckis’s exceedingly clever send-up of Golden Age noirs, it absolutely applies, in several different ways. First off, there’s the nearly seamless blend of animation and live action, creating a world in which big-name cartoon characters mingle with human Hollywood stars. It was one of the first films to employ motion-controlled technology, and still looks better than most of those that came afterward, even decades later. Then there’s the primordial ‘multiverse’ concept, in which recognisable characters from the Disney universe share space with those from other companies, including Warner Bros. and Universal – something which, with Disney owning half the world, seems less impressive today but was mind-blowing back then. Beyond that, Roger Rabbit established a tone for a certain kind of animated movie, one that operates on two different levels for two different audiences. Kids could lose their shit over seeing Mickey Mouse and Yosemite Sam in the same movie, while the script’s pulpy dialogue and innuendo flies right over their head to amuse their parents. Everyone, though, ended up a little bit creeped out by Christopher Lloyd’s genuinely scarring turn as the genocidal Judge Doom.

An eccentric inventor and his loyal canine companion hunt a mutant bunny.

Directors: Steve Box and Nick Park

Best quote: ‘I’m sorry, Gromit – I know you’re doing this for my own good, but the fact is I’m just crackers about cheese.‘

Defining moment: Gromit follows the oversize bunny in a vehicular chase that goes below ground.

British animator Nick Park made his name with a series of award-winning stop-motion shorts featuring Wallace, an inventor whose creations often go awry, and Gromit, his devoted dog. In their Oscar-winning feature debut (a coproduction between Park’s Aardman Animations and DreamWorks), the two are hired to protect their town’s vegetable patches from ravenous rabbits. Wallace tries to brainwash the bunnies with his latest creation (the Mind Manipulation–O-Matic), but instead ends up creating a bigger foe – a towering were-rabbit that emerges at every full moon.

The canvas is a bit bigger than in Aardman’s previous excursions: Celebrities like Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter lend their vocal talents, and there are a few beautifully bombastic action scenes. Yet the endearingly handmade qualities of Park’s shorter works are still fully evident, especially in Gromit’s priceless silent reactions to his human master’s frequent obliviousness. A sequel finally arrived on Netflix in 2025 and was nearly as charming.

A one-man masterpiece.

Director: Don Hertzfeldt

Best quote: ‘Someone sits on the shore and tells him how the waves have been there long before Bill existed, and that they’ll still be there long after he’s gone. Bill looks out at the water and thinks of all the wonderful things he will do with his life.’

Defining moment: In the epic finale, a stick hero is reborn into an ageless existence and learns all the secrets of the universe.

How satisfying it is to find Don Hertzfeldt’s self-made saga of schizophrenia and self-loss nestling comfortably in the higher reaches of our rankings. Written, directed, produced, animated, photographed, voiced and distributed entirely by Hertzfeldt himself (he admits to getting a little help with the editing), It’s Such a Beautiful Day is the tale of a young everyman, Bill, who finds his mind and his world unexpectedly going to pieces.

Hertzfeldt’s style may have started off simple, with stick figures and basic line drawings, but by the time of this feature, it had broadened to include a dizzying array of in-camera, nondigital visual effects. The result is one of the great outsider artworks of the modern era, at once sympathetic and shocking, beautiful and horrifying, angry and hilarious, uplifting and almost unbearably sad. Seek it out.

A Celtic fairytale of impossible beauty.

Director: Tomm Moore

Best quote: ‘My son, remember me in your stories and in your songs. Know that I will always love you, always.’

Defining moment: Saoirse sings the ancient selkie song.

With their intricate woodcut designs and full embrace of both Celtic lore and historical struggles, Cartoon Saloon’s animated works are a wonder to behold, but often come with a heavy barrier to entry for younger audiences and foreigners (see: Wolfwalkers, The Secret of Kells). Song of the Sea, however, strikes a miraculous balance, submerging viewers into a magical realm of faeries and elves, witches and sea spirits. With its ethereal Celtic music serving as a siren song drawing viewers into its eye-popping world, the tale of a mute girl’s quest to understand her ancient lineage is Cartoon Saloon co-founder Tomm Moore’s most accessible work. It’s a stirring journey that serves as an immersion into Celtic heritage without feeling like a history lesson.  

Nightmare Before Christmas director Selick’s follow-up is altogether more unsettling.

Director: Henry Selick

Best quote: ‘They say even the proudest spirit can be broken…with love.’

Defining moment: Coraline’s first, dizzying adventure in the night garden, with its exploding flowers, fountains and mechanical grasshoppers.

The director is an animator whose ghoulishly giddy feature debut, The Nightmare Before Christmas, is worshipped among shopping-mall misfits. Surely, the notion of pairing macabre kid-lit author Neil Gaiman’s Coraline with stop-motion maverick Selick was an inspired one, a perfect peanut-butter-and-chocolate combo for goth teens. Even while this adaptation sometimes feels frustratingly DOA, there are glimpses of greatness that remain inspiring: monstrous transformations, womblike corridors and beasts of all shapes and sizes.

This unflinching war story proves that, in animation, anything is possible.

Director: Isao Takahata

Best quote: ‘September 21, 1945… that was the night I died.’

Defining moment: We don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, but it features one of the most heart-wrenching character deaths in movie history.

The year 1988 saw Studio Ghibli at the peak of its powers, releasing a pair of richly personal tributes to youthful resilience that proved the breadth and brilliance of their work. My Neighbor Totoro was studio founder Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece, a work of wondrous beauty and grace. But it’s matched – some would say surpassed – by Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, perhaps the bleakest and least-forgiving film in our top 100. Set in the midst of WWII, the story follows two children, Setsuko and Seita, as they lose their mother in an American bombing raid and are forced to fend for themselves. At first it’s all a game, but as sickness and starvation begin to intrude, the film deepens and darkens, ultimately reaching a place of complete emotional exhaustion and absolute, devastating grief. This is not a movie to be taken lightly.

In Disney’s extravaganza, eight fantastical vignettes are scored to music by Bach, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky.

Director: No less than 11 directors slaved on individual sequences, many without credit.

Best quote: ‘Mr. Stokowski! Mr. Stokowski!’

Defining moment: Sorcerer’s apprentice Mickey Mouse finds himself on the wrong end of the broomsticks.

At first, Walt Disney’s middlebrow folly was a commercial dog, seriously jeopardizing the company’s bottom line with extravagant touring costs (including the installation of Fantasound, the first stereo theatrical presentation). But re-releases and modifications eventually made the movie profitable– and realized a deeper dream: This was a movie that turned kids on to classical music. It also made conductor Leopold Stokowski a minor celebrity, and produced a best-selling soundtrack. Most memorably among the short films, Mickey Mouse stars in the phantasmagorical ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’ but with musical selections ranging from Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ to Mussorgsky’s ‘Night on Bald Mountain,’ Fantasia was doing some real good, building a global taste for drama and subtlety alike.

A biker teen unleashes a psychic with apocalyptic powers – oh, and it’s 2019.

Director: Katsuhiro Ohtomo

Best quote: ‘The future is not a straight line. It is filled with many crossroads.’

Defining moment: Motorcycle gangs tear through the night destroying all in their wake – a scene that would give Mad Max chills.

Anime’s breakout moment, this supercharged sci-fi thriller turned a niche subgenre into a global phenomenon: Western teens started using the term cyberpunk in casual geek-speak, while Japan’s printed manga suddenly flew off the shelves. To the nonfan dragged along for the ride, the movie felt a lot like Blade Runner and Brazil, featuring incredibly vivid details and attention paid to urban decay. But Akira was also a watershed moment for sci-fi in a larger sense, popularizing ideas of citywide ruination, futuristic rebirth and a distinctly Asian notion of psionic powers that would influence everything from The Matrix to Inception. The mutable setting of Neo-Tokyo anticipated the larger playground of the Internet, still years off but somehow of a piece with these youthful speed racers.

The cartoon Beatles rampage through a psychedelic Pop Art dreamscape.

Director: George Dunning

Best quote: ‘Nothing is Beatleproof!’

Defining moment: The gorgeously downbeat ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sequence, utilizing monochrome photos of Liverpool.

This may prove to be the most divisive film on our list: Hardened Beatlemaniacs will tell you that Yellow Submarine is a travesty, employing fake (and not especially convincing) Liverpudlian accents to tell a nonsensical tale steeped in late-’60s acid-fried sentiment, never mind that the Fab Four pop up in person at the end to give their blessing. Art maniacs, meanwhile, will tell you it’s a dazzling work of the imagination, harnessing every animation technique available at the time to create an eye-frazzling, insanely inventive trip. To be fair, they’re probably both right: The script is silly, the story is cringeworthy, and the Beatle characterizations are a bit soft. But visually it’s breathtaking, one of the few genuinely hallucinatory cinema experiences, and fully deserving of its high placement here.

This Lewis Carroll adaptation, from a brilliant Czech surrealist, is too wild and wonderful for kids.

Director: Jan Svankmajer

Best quote: ‘Alice thought to herself, Now you will see a film… made for children… perhaps.’

Defining moment: The Mad Hatter’s tea party: hilarious, anarchic and a fabulous example of Svankmajer’s ability to make the impossible seem absolutely real.

Jan Svankmajer’s first feature is a characteristically inventive but rigorous account of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, faithful in spirit to the original while remaining conspicuously true to his own highly distinctive brand of surrealism. Blending live action (Kristyna Kohoutová, who plays the heroine, is the only human in the film) with various forms of stop-motion animation, Svankmajer creates a wonderland notable for its bizarre dreamlike logic and its grotesque beauty: Skeletal creatures scuttle and steaks crawl while Alice, no stranger to thoughts of cruel whimsy, changes size and becomes her own doll. It’s brilliantly imaginative, bitingly witty and fittingly Freudian. This is no saccharine celebration of innocence, but a foray into the darker recesses of childhood fears and desires. And therefore, perhaps not a film for children.

An idiosyncratic auteur gets animated with this stop-motion take on Roald Dahl’s children’s novel.

Director: Wes Anderson

Best quote: ‘Redemption? Sure. But in the end, he’s just another dead rat in a garbage pail behind a Chinese restaurant.’

Defining moment: Fox and friends come face-to-face with a mysterious black wolf.

The news that Rushmore director Wes Anderson was directing a stop-motion version of the Roald Dahl classic made complete sense once the film – madcap with a strong sense of refinement – was actually revealed. Stop-motion itself (old-school, hand-made) seems particularly Anderson-esque, and the chance to design an entire new world down to the tiniest detail is something Anderson has always leapt at. And there’s something about Dahl's tale of an urbane, well-dressed fox (voiced by George Clooney) who rises up to defeat three evil, rich farmers that seems totally fitting for this filmmaker. The voice cast, Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, feels especially adult and Wes-like. This is an animation as much for adults as for kids, if not more so, and underlying it all is a smart examination of the clash between instincts and responsibilities. We're all a little bit wild, but sometimes we've got to shape up and represent.

The film that made Christmas creepy.

Director: Henry Selick

Best quote: ‘Jack, you make wounds ooze and flesh crawl!’ (It’s a compliment.)

Defining moment: The opening song, gloriously and ghoulishly upbeat.

It all started in 1982, with a poem written by Tim Burton, then a humble animator at Disney. A year later, Burton pitched A Nightmare Before Christmas to his bosses as a TV special. But the powers that be thought the idea ‘too weird,’ and the project went on the back burner until Beetlejuice and Batman made Burton a hot property.

Too weird? Not a bit. Burton’s graveyard fairy tale is a good old-fashioned musical, with song-and-dance numbers that would get Gene Kelly tapping his feet. It’s the story of Jack Skellington, the king of Halloween Town, who discovers a portal to Christmas Town and likes what he sees – children throwing snowballs instead of heads. No one is dead. Jack crafts a plan to kidnap Father Christmas, or Sandy Claws, as he calls him.

Directed by stop-motion maestro Henry Selick from Burton’s story, the movie took 15 animators almost three years to make. Working with more than 227 puppets, they completed just one minute of the film a week. That translates into mind-boggling detail, right down to the mayor’s spider tie. The dialogue is deliciously macabre, the storytelling dizzyingly inventive and the characters touchingly sweet. A twisted delight.

Not the first animated feature, but the start of the Disney empire.

Directors: David Hand, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce and Ben Sharpsteen

Best quote: ‘Magic mirror on the wall…’

Defining moment: Snow White’s headlong dash through the moonlit forest is expressionistic, beautiful and terrifying.

They called it Disney’s folly. It took years and millions of dollars to produce Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and one huge question remained unanswered right up to the day of release: Would an audience really sit still for 83 minutes of cartoon antics? Of course, the movie was a huge hit, and kick-started Uncle Walt’s decades-long domination of the painted-cel scene. It may not have been the first feature-length animated film – that honor is held by Argentine animator Quirino Cristiani’s 1917 El Apóstol, though all copies have since been destroyed – but it was the first to receive a global release, and the first to wake up audiences (and producers) to the seemingly limitless potential of a brand-new medium.

What makes Snow White truly special is not its success, however, but its originality: Working without a rule book, Disney and his animators created – fully formed – an entirely new genre. Just look at, say, Frozen and ask yourself how far mainstream animation has actually developed: Snow White has a dashing fairy-tale heroine, a hunky but slightly dull dude, lovable pratfalling sidekicks, important life lessons, groundbreaking and gorgeous animation, whistleable tunes and, perhaps most notably, the greatest femme fatale in film history. It just goes to show: You can’t improve on perfection – a lesson that Disney, with its 2025 live-action remake, has failed to heed itself.

The Ted Hughes novel came to Hollywood in a studio movie that broke technical and storytelling boundaries – if not box-office records.

Director: Brad Bird

Best quote: ‘I am not a gun.’

Defining moment: The giant carries Hogarth in his hand, high above the treetops below.

Before directing The Incredibles and Rataouille, animator Brad Bird made his feature debut with this charming, intelligent adaptation of the late 1960s Ted Hughes children’s story The Iron Man. Best known at the time for his work on The Simpsons, Bird moved the tale from Britain to 1950s Maine, lending it distinct Cold War flavor. A young boy, Hogarth (given the surname Hughes in honor of the poet, who died in 1998, a year before the film’s release), discovers a metallic giant in his hometown and fights to protect it from being pulverized by the military – while simultaneously teaching it how to live in peace on earth. The widescreen film has a streak of smart humor as well as a winning, harmonious worldview, and mixes computer animation and more traditional techniques: The CGI was mostly invested in rendering the giant as convincingly as possible, while traditional hand-drawn techniques were reserved for the humans. Visually, the film offers stunning moments without sacrificing a pleasingly old-fashioned air. It wasn’t a success at the box office, although it was hailed as a rare example of a family movie with heart and brains. Thankfully, Pixar gave Bird a chance to fly again.

It ain’t easy being gray in one of Disney’s most simple, cute and memorable tales.

Directors: Ben Sharpsteen, Samuel Armstrong, Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Bill Roberts and John Elliotte

Best quote: ‘It ain’t nobody’s fault you got dem big ears.’

Defining moment: Dumbo visits his caged mom at night and cuddles up to her trunk as it extends through the bars – all to the sound of the lullaby ‘Baby Mine.’

We challenge anyone not to shed a tear at the sight of young Dumbo, the son of a troubled circus elephant, locking trunks with his incarcerated single mother through the bars of a cage. It doesn't help that the weepie lullaby on the soundtrack, ‘Baby Mine,’ is machine-tooled to get the waterworks going. This was Disney's fourth animated feature, and its short running time and simple structure were forcibly concocted after both Pinocchio and Fantasia had performed poorly. The movie's story of an elephant born and then unfairly separated from its mother might be straightforward, but there are still some memorable set pieces along the way, including scenes of the big top being erected during a storm and the circus train yanking itself over a rugged landscape. There's experimentation here, too, especially during a jazz-scored, trippy sequence when Dumbo accidentally gets drunk and sees ‘pink elephants on parade.’ Also unforgettable, though not necessarily helpful to society, are the early scenes of cute storks delivering baby animals, an early sign of the ‘no sex, thanks, we're Disney’ mantra. And who can forget Dumbo's big, floppy ears, so unwieldy that he ends up wrapping himself up in them in a brilliant piece of animated slapstick?

A superheroic family tries to blend into their quiet suburban lifestyle, but realizes that their skills are nothing to be ashamed of.

Director: Brad Bird

Best quote: ‘When everyone’s super…no one will be.’

Defining moment: ‘No capes!’ declares Edna Mode, the film’s snooty fashionista, and we see the fates that befell some unlucky caped crusaders.

Firing on all cylinders, Pixar’s first film to earn a PG rating signaled a grabbing of the brass ring: Yes, the studio’s computer animation was peerless, but could it also do marital malaise, middle-aged belly spread and sneakily ambitious philosophy – all of it tucked into spandex? Writer-director Brad Bird commanded a degree of control unprecedented since the days of old Walt himself. Everything was riding on his long-germinating vision of an exceptional family rediscovering its purpose. The plot’s spirit proved infectious, the reviews rapturous, and naturally spawned a sequel, with another on the horizon. Thematically, the movie’s deepest fear concerns the creeping slump of mediocrity: If greatness lies within us, why can’t we let it out? Maybe it’s because we’re told – in subtle ways – not to shine too brightly and make others feel inadequate. Some pegged the notion as straight out of Ayn Rand (this would have been her favorite movie ever), but the idea was somehow made to feel inclusive via Bird’s humor, panache and narrative clarity. The Incredibles makes us believe in heroes, but more importantly, it reclaims the virtue of heroism itself: a blessing, an ideal, an ambition. And it’s not easy.

Cowboy or spaceman – which is Andy’s favorite plaything? And how do these secretly alive toys feel about that?

Director: John Lasseter

Best quote: ‘To infinity… and beyond!’

Defining moment: The elaborate escape from evil Sid’s room, a breathtaking action sequence that put Hollywood’s A-list to shame.

Nothing less than the first shot in what would become a revolution, John Lasseter’s simple tale turned adults into happy children, naysayers into believers, and computer animation into the dominant expression of an entire industry. Pixar’s debut feature is its most beautiful thing, emphasis on thing: The genius idea here was to embrace the stuff of toys – to imbue plastic and cloth with solidity and tactility. Suddenly there was a real weight to billions of bits and bytes, and audiences were enraptured. Naturally, none of this would have worked had there not been a killer script, labored upon for years by a creative team that included Lasseter and future directors Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton and The Avengers’ Joss Whedon. The humanity imparted by Tom Hanks as the passed-over Woody can’t be understated: This was a role rich enough to lure the hottest actor in the game. Toy Story speaks to our love of play, and the way we invest our dolls and action figures with the souls of whom we want to become. It makes sense that these toys would keep dreaming even when put away for the night. But the film’s lasting impact is simpler than that: Swinging, bouncing or skidding, toys are alive in our minds. Lasseter’s team bent gravity itself to make that a reality.

Miyazaki proves he has the heart of a child, the eye of a painter and the soul of a poet.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Best quote: ‘Trees and people used to be good friends.’

Defining moment: The first appearance of the roving cat-bus will have viewers of all ages gasping in delight.

Some filmmakers build their great artworks with blood, sweat and toil. Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki seems to sprout his from seeds, planting them in good earth and patiently watering them until they burst into bloom. My Neighbor Totoro is the gentlest, most unassuming film on this list, a tale of inquisitive children, mischievous dust fairies, magical trees and shy sylvan creatures. But in its own quietly remarkable way, it’s also one of the richest and most overwhelming.

This is a story whose roots go deep: into Japanese tradition and culture, into its creator’s personal past, into a collective childhood filled with tales of mystery and a love of all things that grow. There is darkness at the film’s heart – the fear of losing a parent, the loneliness and frustration of childhood – but its touch is gossamer-light, delighting in simple pleasures like raindrops on an umbrella, dust motes drifting in the sun and midnight dances in the garden. The visual style is unmistakably Japanese (unadorned and artful) and the theme song is so sugary-chirrupy-sweet that it’s impossible to dislodge once heard. But the cumulative effect is unique and utterly all-encompassing, returning us to a world we have all, at one time, lived in – and perhaps will again.

Moving is a drag for ten-year-old Chihiro, until she discovers she’s meant to work in a bathhouse for the spirit world.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Best quote: ‘There must be some mistake: None of these pigs are my parents!’

Defining moment: Tea and cakes with the monstrous Yubaba and No-Face – a moment in the same surreal league as Lewis Carroll.

The apex of Japanese animation – to fans worldwide, all animation – is one of cinema’s finest tales of untrammeled imagination. It’s a movie that emboldens children to embrace weirdness and wonder, and adults to remember how they once did. The plot is a stew of essential anxieties: dislocation, separation from one’s parents, fear of disappearing forever. Even more thoroughly, Spirited Away is a compendium of ancient folklores – the secret lives of radishes and other gods, the sins we commit against nature, her punishments. But as brilliantly woven together by Hayao Miyazaki (at the peak of his creative gifts), the movie is basically a story about growing up. The world is strange; let’s not fool ourselves. But maybe we, as human beings, are stranger. Chihiro is constantly (and riotously) told that she reeks; she fumbles around and incites fury. The lesson here is humility in the face of immortal forces. Critics were wowed, sensing parallels with Japan’s busted economic bubble and polluted streams. Yet the content was – and is – strong enough to stand on its own, a palimpsest of psychology, dreams and fear brought to life by exquisite craft. No film on our list speaks more to the inner animal and anima; is it any wonder those words are so close to animation?

A wooden puppet yearns to be a real boy; he must prove himself worthy.

Directors: Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Norman Ferguson, Jack Kinney, Wilfred Jackson and T. Hee

Best quote: ‘Always let your conscience be your guide.’

Defining moment: Playing pool, drinking beers, smoking cigars: Who knew it could transform kids into jackasses? (Literally.)

Pinocchio is the most magical of animated movies, a high point of cinematic invention. Its influence on fantasy is massive: Steven Spielberg quotes the soaring ballad ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ in his dream project Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and remade the whole picture with his aching robot-boy adventure, A.I.). Disney’s second feature – originally a box-office bomb – begins with a sweetly singing cricket, yet plunges into scenes from a nightmare: in front of a jeering audience on a carnival stage; into the belly of a monstrous whale; beyond all human recognition. (Pinocchio’s extending schnoz is animation’s most sinister and profound metaphor.) It’s staggering to think of this material as intended for children, but that’s the power here, a conduit to the churning undercurrent of formulating identity. The takeaway is hard to argue with: Don’t lie, to yourself or others. Cultural theorists have, for decades, discussed Pinocchio in psychosexual terms or as a guide to middle-class assimilation. But those readings are like cracking open a snow globe to see that it’s only water. A swirling adventure flecked with shame, rehabilitation, death and rebirth, the movie contains a universe of feelings. Pinocchio will remain immortal as long as we draw, paint, tell tall tales and wish upon stars.