The Greatest Animated Films

Animation’s specific advantage over live action is not that it can show impossible things — live action can do that too, now. Its specific advantage is that it can make impossible things feel emotionally true in ways live action cannot, 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 rather than pretending it does not 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.

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1. Spirited Away (2001)

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

The greatest animated film ever made and one of the greatest films in any medium — a ten-year-old girl navigating a spirit world that operates 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’s central argument — that work is dignity, that the willingness to do difficult things is a form of identity — is embedded in every scene without ever being stated, communicated entirely through what Chihiro does rather than through what anyone tells her.

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. Everything in it has been thought through from a consistent mythology, and none of it has been explained.

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2. 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 genuinely irresolvable, and the film refuses to identify a villain because it is honest that the world does not organize itself into villains. Lady Eboshi protects lepers and outcasts while destroying the forest. The forest gods defend their territory against human encroachment that is itself driven by human survival. San cannot live in the human world. Ashitaka cannot choose sides. The film ends not with resolution but with possibility.

The animation’s specific achievement is the rendering of scale — the Forest Spirit walking across water, the Nightwalker dissolving everything it touches — that communicates the specific quality of something ancient and enormous being destroyed by something small and relentless. The scale is the argument.

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3. 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 not an action film or an adventure film. It is a record of a specific kind of death — slow, preventable, the product of pride and circumstance and the specific indifference of a society at the end of its resources. The fireflies are the film’s central image: brief, beautiful, extinguished.

The specific horror of Grave of the Fireflies is that it is animated. The medium that is most associated with safety and childhood is used to show the deaths of children, which produces a specific dissonance that makes the film more disturbing than any live-action equivalent. You are not protected by the medium. The children die anyway.

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4. 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.

The film’s environmental argument — Earth abandoned because humanity consumed it entirely — is embedded in every frame of the opening sequence without ever being stated. The towers of compressed waste are the argument. The film trusts the audience to read it and does not explain it.

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5. 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, which makes Carl Fredricksen’s subsequent 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 is carrying. The house is not a house. It is Ellie.

The film’s specific achievement is that it earns 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 not that he gets over it — it is that Ellie told him, in a book he didn’t know she’d filled, that she did not consider their life together a failed adventure. The adventure was the life.

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6. Toy Story (1995)

“To infinity and beyond!”

The first feature-length computer animated film is also one of 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 has always held. The film is a workplace comedy about displacement anxiety that is simultaneously 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 simultaneously 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 registers is executed at the level of the best films in each genre. The Incredibles works because Bird understood that the superheroes’ specific powers are expressions of their specific 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 is partially correct and entirely wrong simultaneously, which is the mark of a villain who has identified a real problem and arrived at a catastrophically wrong solution.

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

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

Made before Studio Ghibli existed and responsible for its founding — Nausicaä’s commercial success provided the capital — this is where Miyazaki’s complete creative vision first fully emerged: the ecological world, the female protagonist who leads through understanding rather than 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 is the development of what this film established.

Nausicaä herself is animation’s greatest female protagonist — not because she is powerful or skilled, though she is both, but because her specific quality of 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 rather than fear, which is the film’s central argument about how humans should relate to the world they have inherited.

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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 genuine scope and genuine 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.

The film is 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 is rendered with the specific visual language of Japanese post-atomic anxiety that gives the explosion that ends the film its specific weight.

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10. 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 operated 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 demonstrated it could do something live action could not do, producing a sensation of weightless movement through impossible space that has never been replicated.

The film’s specific achievement is Belle — 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 genuinely limiting environment, and whose relationship with the Beast develops through books and conversation before it develops through anything else.

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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 precisely calibrated for maximum emotional damage that it produced a generation of adults who cannot watch it without the specific quality of grief that the film installed in their childhood. The film understands that children can process tragedy if it is handled honestly, and it handles Mufasa’s death with complete honesty about what it is.

Hans Zimmer’s score is the film’s specific formal achievement — the African-influenced orchestration communicates the specific quality of the Pride Lands as a world with its own cultural weight rather than simply as an animal kingdom, and “Circle of Life” opening the film establishes the cosmological register immediately. The film takes itself seriously as an epic and produces an epic.

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12. 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 rather than determined. The Iron Giant was built as a weapon. He chooses not to be one. The film’s specific emotional power comes from the Giant’s specific decision — made freely, made at the cost of his own existence, made with the specific quality of someone who has understood something essential about the difference between what you were built to do and what you choose to do.

The film was a commercial failure on release and has since been recognized as one of the greatest animated films ever made — a film that understood its audience better than its distributor did, that trusted children to process genuine sacrifice and genuine 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.

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13. Fantasia (1940)

“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 is also the most formally ambitious animated work ever produced, an attempt to visualize classical music rather than to accompany it with animation. 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 has 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.

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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 subsequent theocracy — demonstrates animation’s specific capacity for autobiography. The stylized black-and-white images communicate memory rather than documentary record, the simplification of the visual style matching the simplification of a child’s understanding of enormous historical events. The adult looking back does not reconstruct the events with adult knowledge. She reconstructs them with the specific partial understanding she had at the time.

The film is also the clearest demonstration that animation is not a children’s medium — the subject matter, the politics, the specific account of adolescent alienation in Vienna and the specific loneliness of the exile — are adult experiences rendered in a visual style that uses simplicity as precision rather than limitation.

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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 for the specific reason that traumatic memory cannot be reconstructed in live action — the images that trauma produces are not photographic but dreamlike, fragmented, distorted by the mind’s refusal to process what it witnessed. The animation is not simplification. It is the honest form of the content.

The film ends by breaking its own form — the final sequence replaces animation with archival footage of the massacre’s aftermath, which lands with the specific force of reality breaking through the protective layer of stylization. It is the most formally honest ending in the medium: the animation was distance; the footage is what was actually 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, with the specific quality of 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.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and divided audiences who came expecting Spirited Away’s accessible magic and found something more interior and more demanding. It is 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.

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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, the specific quality of a world that has 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 the specific quality of her relationship with Howl is the film’s argument that love is the specific resistance available to individuals inside the impersonal machinery of war.

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18. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

“Mirror, mirror on the wall.”

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 specific quality of the dwarfs’ individual personalities — established the foundations that the entire medium has built on.

The Evil Queen remains animation’s most effective villain — her specific vanity, her specific transformation, the specific horror of the forest sequence in which Snow White’s fear brings the trees to life — and the film’s darkness is genuine rather than softened for children. Disney understood in 1937 what Pixar would rediscover in the 1990s: children can process genuine fear and genuine darkness if the story handles it honestly.

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19. 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 actually works: sadness is not 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.

The film’s specific achievement is Bing Bong — Riley’s imaginary friend who accepts his own fading because the memory of joy is more important than his own continuity. It is animation’s most quietly devastating death scene precisely because Bing Bong understands what he is doing and chooses it freely.

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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 texture of hand-drawn comics with the depth of three-dimensional CGI, running at different frame rates for different characters to communicate the specific quality 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 specific world — Brooklyn, Afro-Latino culture, hip-hop — has a visual identity that previous Spider-Man films could not have given him.

The film’s central argument — “anyone can wear the mask” — is the most genuinely democratic statement in the superhero film genre, and it is made convincingly because the film has spent ninety minutes showing what it actually means for a specific person in a specific world to discover that the identity is available to them. Miles earns the mask. The film earns the statement.

Animation Is Not a Genre

The assumption that animation is a children’s medium — or a genre rather than a form — has limited what Western studios make and what Western audiences expect. The films on this list are not children’s films that adults can also enjoy. They are films. Grave of the Fireflies is not a children’s film. Waltz with Bashir is not a children’s film. Akira is not a children’s film. Even the films that are primarily for children — Spirited Away, The Lion King, Toy Story — operate at a level of emotional and thematic complexity that fully adult films frequently do not reach.

The medium’s specific advantage is not that it can show impossible things. It is that impossible things feel emotionally true in animation in ways they do not 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.

What’s Missing?

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