The Greatest Animated Films

Animation’s advantage over live action isn’t that it can show impossible things, live action can do that too, now. Its advantage is that it can make impossible things feel emotionally true in ways live action can’t, because the drawn or rendered image carries a different relationship to reality than the photographed one. The viewer’s relationship to an animated character is different from their relationship to a photographed actor, and the best animated films exploit this difference instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.

The list is deliberately international (heavy on Studio Ghibli, which is simply the correct reflection of where the medium’s greatest work has been done) and covers eight decades of animated filmmaking across five countries.

The idea that animation is kid stuff is backwards. Some of the most grown-up filmmaking I know of was drawn by hand, and several films on this page move me more than anything with real actors in it. The studios that treat the medium as a babysitter are making a bad call, and this list is my argument against them.

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1. Spirited Away (2001)

► Read the full review of Spirited Away (2001)

“Once you’ve met someone you never really forget them.”

The greatest animated film ever made and among the greatest films in any medium, a ten-year-old girl finding her way through a spirit world that works by its own consistent internal logic, learning to work, learning to remember, learning to hold onto her own name when the world around her is designed to make her forget it. Miyazaki embeds his central argument (that work is dignity, that the willingness to do difficult things is a form of identity) in every scene without ever stating it, communicating it entirely through what Chihiro does.

The film is also the most inventive piece of character design in animation history (No-Face, the radish spirit, the river god arriving for a bath, Yubaba and Zeniba) each entity is a complete visual concept expressing a complete idea, and the spirit bathhouse they inhabit is the most realized fictional world in the medium. Miyazaki has thought everything in it through from a consistent mythology, and he explains none of it.

Spirited Away is the film I’d save if I could keep only one on this page. What moves me is how much Miyazaki trusts a child to be capable. Chihiro wins by hard work and by hanging onto her own name, and I find that braver than any sword fight in any fantasy epic.

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2. Princess Mononoke (1997)

► Read the full review of Princess Mononoke (1997)

“I want you to live.”

Miyazaki’s medieval Japan is the most morally complete world in animated cinema. Every faction has a legitimate claim, every conflict is irresolvable, and the film refuses to identify a villain because it’s honest that the world doesn’t organize itself into villains. Lady Eboshi protects lepers and outcasts while destroying the forest. The forest gods defend their territory against human encroachment that’s itself driven by human survival. San can’t live in the human world. Ashitaka can’t choose sides. The film ends not with resolution but with possibility.

The animation’s achievement is the rendering of scale (the Forest Spirit walking across water, the Nightwalker dissolving everything it touches) that shows something small and relentless destroying something ancient and enormous. The scale is the argument.

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3. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

► Read the full review of Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

“September 21, 1945. That was the night I died.”

Takahata’s film opens with its protagonist’s death and then tells you how he got there: two children, Seita and Setsuko, surviving the firebombing of Kobe and slowly dying of malnutrition and neglect in postwar Japan. The film is a record of one kind of death: slow, preventable, the product of pride and circumstance and the indifference of a society at the end of its resources. The fireflies are the film’s central image: brief, beautiful, extinguished.

The horror of Grave of the Fireflies is that it’s animated. The medium that’s most tied to safety and childhood is used to show the deaths of children. That produces a dissonance that makes the film more disturbing than any live-action equivalent. You’re not protected by the medium. The children die anyway.

I rate Grave of the Fireflies a perfect film, and I’m in no hurry to put myself through it again. Takahata lets those two children fade the slow, stupid way hunger kills people in wartime, and it devastates me. Anybody who still thinks animation is just cartoons should start here and see how long that opinion lasts.

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4. WALL-E (2008)

► Read the full review of WALL-E (2008)

“WALL-E.”

The first forty minutes of WALL-E are virtually wordless: a small robot alone on an abandoned Earth, collecting objects of human civilization that he finds beautiful, watching Hello, Dolly on a salvaged screen and learning what it means to want to hold someone’s hand. Stanton’s specific achievement is building a complete and fully realized character through behavior alone, with no dialogue and no exposition, communicating WALL-E’s entire psychology through what he chooses to keep and how he arranges what he keeps.

Every frame of the opening sequence carries the film’s environmental argument, Earth abandoned because humanity consumed it entirely, without ever stating it. The towers of compressed waste are the argument. The film trusts the audience to read it and doesn’t explain it. Those wordless forty minutes are the finest thing Pixar has put on screen, and I’d set them beside any silent film you like. If I’m going to complain at all, it’s about the second half, which is good but louder and more ordinary than the opening.

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5. Up (2009)

► Read the full review of Up (2009)

“Adventure is out there!”

Four minutes. A complete marriage. Meeting, falling in love, the miscarriage they never speak of, growing old together, the illness, the death, the empty chair. Pixar’s opening montage of Carl and Ellie’s life together is the most compressed and most complete emotional investment in cinema history. That makes Carl Fredricksen’s later adventure (flying his house to South America on balloons to fulfill a promise he made sixty years earlier) carry the full weight of everything he’s carrying. The house is Ellie.

The film’s achievement is that it works as a children’s adventure film by refusing to treat its protagonist’s grief as backstory. Carl’s loss is present in every scene. The resolution is that Ellie told him, in a book he didn’t know she’d filled, that she didn’t consider their life together a failed adventure. The adventure was the life.

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6. Toy Story (1995)

“To infinity and beyond!”

As the first feature-length computer animated film, it’s also among the most carefully structured comedies in the medium, the buddy film as existential crisis, in which Woody’s identity is based on being the most loved toy and Buzz Lightyear’s arrival destroys that identity, forcing Woody to confront who he is without the position he’s always held. The film is a workplace comedy about displacement anxiety that’s at once a children’s adventure about toys, and neither version of the film diminishes the other.

Lasseter and the Pixar team built a world with completely consistent rules (toys are alive and hide it, their existence depends entirely on a child’s love, being lost is an existential crisis) and then explored those rules systematically. The Pixar method begins here: find the emotional truth of the premise, build everything around that truth, trust the audience to meet you there.

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7. The Incredibles (2004)

“Where is my super suit?”

Brad Bird’s film is at the same time a superhero film, a suburban marriage comedy, a spy thriller, a meditation on exceptionalism and mediocrity, and a James Bond pastiche. And every one of these tones is executed at the level of the best films in each genre.

The Incredibles works because Bird understood that the superheroes’ powers are expressions of their family dynamics: Bob’s strength is the strength of a man who wants to help but is trapped; Helen’s elasticity is the stretch of a woman holding everything together; Violet’s invisibility is the invisibility of adolescent self-consciousness.

Syndrome’s argument (“when everyone’s super, no one will be”) is the film’s sharpest piece of writing because it’s partially correct and entirely wrong at once, the mark of a villain who has identified a real problem and arrived at a catastrophically wrong solution.

Anyone who’s sick of superhero movies should see The Incredibles. Bird wrote a marriage under strain and dressed it in capes, and he pulled it off better than most live-action studios manage with every effect money can buy. Syndrome is the kind of villain I wish more writers bothered to build.

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8. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)

► Read the full review of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984)

“The forest is growing to purify the polluted soil.”

Nausicaä came before Studio Ghibli existed, and its commercial success provided the capital to found it. Miyazaki’s complete creative vision first fully emerged here: the ecological world, the female protagonist who leads through understanding instead of force, the refusal to assign simple moral positions to complex conflicts, the world whose natural logic is the story’s argument. Everything that follows in his filmography develops what this film established.

Nausicaä herself is animation’s greatest female protagonist. She’s powerful and skilled, but what puts her at the top is that her empathy with the world around her is presented as the most valuable form of intelligence available. She understands the ohmu because she approaches them with curiosity, and that’s the film’s central argument about how humans should relate to the world they’ve inherited.

Nausicaä doesn’t get half the attention it deserves, and that’s an oversight. It’s rougher than the later Ghibli films, and that’s my one reservation. The heroine makes up for it. A young woman who solves a crisis by trying to understand the thing everyone else wants to kill is a hero I’d like to see a lot more often.

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9. Akira (1988)

“What is Akira?”

Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 adaptation of his own manga changed the Western world’s understanding of what animation could be, a dystopian science fiction film of scope and darkness, with production values that shamed most live-action science fiction of the same era. Neo-Tokyo 2019 was hand-drawn by a team of 160 animators in a production that used 327 distinct colors and 50 exclusively developed for the film. The technical achievement is inseparable from the artistic one: the film looks like nothing else because nothing made like this had ever been attempted.

It’s also the first major animated work to grapple with the psychological cost of unchecked power. Tetsuo’s transformation from bullied teenager to uncontrollable god is the most complete portrait of the corrupting quality of absolute power available to an adolescent psychology, and it’s rendered with the visual language of Japanese post-atomic anxiety that gives the explosion that ends the film its weight.

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10. Beauty and the Beast (1991)

► Read the full review of Beauty and the Beast (1991)

“Tale as old as time.”

The only animated film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture before the animated feature category existed, and the film that defined the Disney Renaissance’s specific ambition. To make animated films that worked at the emotional and narrative level of the best live-action musicals. Beauty and the Beast succeeds completely: the ballroom sequence, with its CGI-enabled camera movement through a hand-drawn space, is the moment animation showed it could do something live action couldn’t do, producing a sensation of weightless movement through impossible space that’s never been replicated.

Belle is the film’s specific achievement, a Disney princess whose defining quality is intellectual curiosity, whose specific dissatisfaction with her provincial life is shown to be a legitimate response to a limiting environment, and whose relationship with the Beast develops through books and conversation before it develops through anything else.

Belle is the Disney heroine I’d want a kid to grow up with, a young woman who’s bored by her small town and isn’t shy about it. I can’t think of a better lesson than that curiosity is worth the trouble it causes. The ballroom scene gives me goosebumps, and I don’t say that about many animated sequences.

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11. The Lion King (1994)

“Remember who you are.”

The Lion King’s Mufasa death sequence is the most traumatic moment in mainstream children’s cinema. A child watching his father die and being made to believe it was his fault, a scene so carefully calibrated for maximum emotional damage that it produced a generation of adults who can’t watch it without the grief that the film installed in their childhood. The film understands that children can process tragedy if it’s handled honestly, and it handles Mufasa’s death with complete honesty about what it is.

Hans Zimmer’s score is the film’s formal achievement, the African-influenced orchestration presents the Pride Lands as a world with its own cultural weight, not simply as an animal kingdom, and “Circle of Life” opening the film establishes the cosmological tone immediately. The film takes itself seriously as an epic and produces an epic.

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12. The Iron Giant (1999)

► Read the full review of The Iron Giant (1999)

“Superman.”

Brad Bird’s second entry on this list and the one that most explicitly states the animated film’s central theme: identity is chosen. The Iron Giant was built as a weapon. He chooses not to be one. The film’s emotional power comes from the Giant’s decision, made freely, made at the cost of his own existence, made by someone who has understood something essential about the difference between what you were built to do and what you choose to do.

Commercially, the film failed on release and has since been recognized as among the greatest animated films ever made (a film that understood its audience better than its distributor did, that trusted children to process sacrifice and moral complexity, and that produced its final image, the Giant reassembling in Iceland, as the film’s honest answer to death: some things don’t end, they wait).

What happened to The Iron Giant on release was inexcusable. Warner Bros had a gem in its hands and let it sink at the box office. The Giant choosing to be Superman is the most moving thing I’ve seen a robot do on screen, and I’d say that with WALL-E on the same list.

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13. Fantasia (1940)

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“Music exists in time. Animation exists in time. Together they are something else entirely.”

Walt Disney’s most radical film, a concert film for children that’s also the most formally ambitious animated work ever produced, an attempt to visualize classical music. The Night on Bald Mountain sequence is still the most complete integration of music and image in the medium’s history: Chernabog summoning the dead while Mussorgsky’s composition reaches its climax is a piece of sustained visual music that’s never been equalled. Disney lost money on the film and remained proud of it for the rest of his life.

Fantasia’s specific ambition, to use animation not as story but as pure visual music, has never been fully attempted again in mainstream cinema, and its failure commercially has made studios cautious about the experiment. The film exists as both a monument and a road not taken.

Fantasia is the kind of risk I wish studios still had the nerve to take. Disney lost money on it and stayed proud of it, and he was right to. Night on Bald Mountain is as close to pure nightmare as animation has come, and no modern budget has bought anything that matches it.

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14. Persepolis (2007)

“I was born with religion.”

Marjane Satrapi’s adaptation of her own graphic memoir (growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, and the later theocracy) shows animation’s capacity for autobiography. The stylized black-and-white images communicate memory, not documentary record, the simplification of the visual style matching the simplification of a child’s understanding of enormous historical events. The adult looking back doesn’t reconstruct the events with adult knowledge. She reconstructs them with the partial understanding she had at the time.

Of all the entries, this is also the clearest demonstration that animation isn’t a children’s medium (the subject matter, the politics, the account of adolescent alienation in Vienna and the loneliness of the exile) are adult experiences rendered in a visual style that uses simplicity as precision.

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15. Waltz with Bashir (2008)

“I don’t remember anything from Lebanon.”

Ari Folman’s animated documentary about his own suppressed memories of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre uses animation because traumatic memory can’t be reconstructed in live action: the images that trauma produces aren’t photographic but dreamlike, fragmented, distorted by the mind’s refusal to process what it witnessed. The animation is the right form for the content.

At the end, the film breaks its own form, the final sequence replaces animation with archival footage of the massacre’s aftermath. That hits with the force of reality breaking through the protective layer of stylization. It’s the most formally honest ending in the medium: the animation was distance; the footage is what was there.

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16. The Boy and the Heron (2023)

“How do you wish to live?”

Miyazaki’s self-described final film (made after his announced retirement, at age 82, by an artist settling accounts) is his most personal and most deliberately difficult work. The world it builds is closer to dream logic than any of his previous films, and the film’s central question (how do you wish to live, asked of both the protagonist and the audience) is the question Miyazaki is asking himself about his own legacy and his own relationship to the act of creation.

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the film divided audiences who came expecting Spirited Away‘s accessible magic and found something more interior and more demanding. It’s a less immediately satisfying film than Spirited Away and a more completely honest one. The work of a man at the end of his career examining what it meant to spend a life building worlds for other people to live in.

I prefer a difficult Miyazaki to an easy film from almost anyone else. The Boy and the Heron asks for more patience than Spirited Away, and parts of it confuse me. What stays with me is an old artist asking out loud whether the work was worth a life, and I find that braver than another crowd-pleaser would have been.

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17. Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

“I feel terrible, like there’s a weight on my chest.”

Miyazaki’s adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’s novel departs significantly from the source and produces something different and equally valid. A film made during the Iraq War invasion in which the background conflict is always present, always senseless, always destroying beautiful things for reasons nobody in the film can clearly articulate. The war is the film’s constant atmosphere: aircraft, bombing, a world that’s decided to damage itself and is proceeding with that decision regardless of what individuals want.

Sophie’s aging, the witch’s curse that turns her into an old woman, is the film’s central visual metaphor for how love and war each age their participants, and her relationship with Howl is the film’s argument that love is the resistance available to individuals inside the impersonal machinery of war.

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18. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

► Read the full review of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

“Mirror, mirror on the wall.”

Snow White was the first feature-length animated film, the film that the entire industry called “Disney’s Folly” before it became the highest-grossing sound film of its time and proved that animation could sustain a feature-length narrative. Everything on this list exists because Snow White was made and succeeded. The technical innovations (the multiplane camera, the rotoscoped human movement, the dwarfs’ individual personalities) established the foundations that the entire medium has built on.

The Evil Queen remains animation’s most effective villain (her vanity, her transformation, the horror of the forest sequence in which Snow White’s fear brings the trees to life) and the film’s darkness is real, and Disney didn’t soften it for children. Disney understood in 1937 what Pixar would rediscover in the 1990s: children can process fear and darkness if the story handles it honestly.

The forest sequence in Snow White scares me, and the film is nearly ninety years old. Everyone who called it Disney’s Folly had to watch it make history, and it’s a gift when the gatekeepers are that wrong in public. Every film on this page owes it a debt.

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19. Inside Out (2015)

► Read the full review of Inside Out (2015)

“Crying helps me slow down and obsess over the weight of life’s problems.”

Pixar’s most formally innovative film (the interior of an eleven-year-old’s mind rendered as a landscape of color-coded emotions, memory spheres, and the Long-Term Memory shelves where things go to be forgotten) uses animation’s ability to make the invisible visible to show how emotional development works: sadness isn’t the enemy of joy but its prerequisite, mixed emotions are more mature than pure ones, and the core memories that define personality are the ones colored by more than one feeling.

What the film achieves comes down to Bing Bong, Riley’s imaginary friend who accepts his own fading because the memory of joy is more important than his own continuity. It’s animation’s most understated and devastating death scene because Bing Bong understands what he’s doing and chooses it freely.

Inside Out has the nerve to tell kids that sadness has a job to do, and I wish more adults had heard that at eleven. Bing Bong’s goodbye moves me because he chooses it. Pixar could’ve played that scene for a cheap tear, and it trusted the audience instead.

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20. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

“Anyone can wear the mask.”

Spider-Verse broke the assumption that CGI animation had to look like Pixar, it invented a new visual language that combined the look of hand-drawn comics with the depth of three-dimensional CGI, running at different frame rates for different characters to communicate the feel of each Spider-Person’s world. The visual invention is the argument: each dimension has its own aesthetic, each Spider-Person has their own style, and Miles Morales’s own world (Brooklyn, Afro-Latino culture, hip-hop) has a visual identity that previous Spider-Man films couldn’t have given him.

Its central argument (“anyone can wear the mask”) is the most democratic statement in the superhero film genre, and it’s made convincingly because the film has spent ninety minutes showing what it means for one person in one world to discover that the identity is available to them. Miles proves he belongs in the mask. The film proves its statement.

Spider-Verse gives me hope for big-studio animation. After years of glossy computer animation that all looked alike, a studio finally let its artists get weird, and every frame looks like somebody fought for it in a meeting and won. I want a lot more films this reckless.

Animation Is Not a Genre

The assumption that animation is a children’s medium, or a genre instead of a form, has limited what Western studios make and what Western audiences expect. The films on this list are films. Grave of the Fireflies isn’t a children’s film. Waltz with Bashir isn’t a children’s film. Akira isn’t a children’s film.

Even the films that are primarily for children (Spirited Away, The Lion King, Toy Story) work at a level of emotional and thematic complexity that fully adult films frequently don’t reach.

The medium’s specific advantage is that impossible things feel emotionally true in animation in ways they don’t in live action, because the drawn or rendered image carries a different emotional contract with the viewer than the photographed one. The best animated films exploit this difference. The worst ones pretend it doesn’t exist.

The worst habit is how often people shelve great work in the kids’ section and forget it. Grave of the Fireflies and Persepolis deserve the same serious attention anyone would give a war drama or a memoir, and a studio that only greenlights talking-animal comedies is wasting the most flexible tool in film. Start with the hard ones on this list if you want to see what the form can do.

What animated film is missing from this list?

Castle in the Sky. My Neighbor Totoro. Bambi. Pinocchio. Perfect Blue. Drop your nominations in the comments.