Best Animated Movies: The 25 Greatest Ever Made

“Animation is just for kids” is the single dumbest sentence in film criticism, and I hear it constantly. Some of the greatest films ever made — not greatest animated films, greatest films — are animated. The medium can do things live action can’t: pure visual imagination, emotional abstraction, worlds that exist only because someone drew them into being.

I’ve watched an unreasonable amount of animation — professionally, which is my excuse — and the best animated movies use the freedom of the medium to say things live action couldn’t say as well. Here’s the canon: the masterpieces, the studio peaks, and the hidden gems that deserve a bigger audience.

Table of Contents

• What Makes an Animated Movie Great
• The Mount Rushmore of Animation
• Pixar’s Peak: The Studio That Redefined the Medium
• Studio Ghibli: Animation as Art Cinema
• Disney’s Golden Ages
• The Modern Revolution: Spider-Verse and Beyond
• Hidden Gems You Need to See
• The “Just for Kids” Myth (A Rant)
• Frequently Asked Questions

What Makes an Animated Movie Great

Animation gets judged on a curve it doesn’t deserve — “good for a kids’ movie” is a backhanded compliment. I judge animated films by the same standards as everything else, plus one:

1. Story first. The best animated movies would work as great stories in any medium. The animation elevates them; it doesn’t excuse them. (This is screenwriting fundamentals — animation doesn’t get a pass on structure.)
2. Visual imagination. If you’re going to draw every frame, draw something. The greats create images that couldn’t exist otherwise — not just realistic worlds rendered in CG, but visions.
3. Emotional honesty. Animation’s secret weapon: abstraction lets audiences project. A drawn face can express grief more purely than a photographed one, because your brain fills in the gaps.
4. Respect for the audience. The greats never talk down. Kids notice condescension instantly; adults notice it eventually. The all-timers play to everyone at once.

The Mount Rushmore of Animation

Four films that transcend the medium entirely:

1. Spirited Away (2001). Miyazaki’s masterpiece is the greatest animated film ever made, and I’d argue it’s one of the ten greatest films ever made, period. A girl’s parents are turned into pigs; she must work in a bathhouse for spirits to free them. It’s Alice in Wonderland rewritten through Japanese folklore, animated with a level of craft that still hasn’t been matched. No villains, no easy answers, just a child learning courage. The train sequence — two minutes of near-silence — is the most beautiful scene in animation history.

2. Toy Story 3 (2010). Pixar’s trilogy-closer is about the terror of being outgrown and the grace of letting go — which is to say, it’s about parenting, childhood, mortality, and love, disguised as a movie about toys. The incinerator scene, where the toys hold hands accepting death, is the bravest sequence in any family film ever. I have seen grown men weep in theaters at this. I was one of them.

3. The Lion King (1994). Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an African animal epic, with Elton John songs and the most stunning opening sequence in animation (that sunrise, that score). It proved hand-drawn animation could carry genuine mythic weight. “Remember who you are” still gives me chills.

4. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). The film that broke animation open again — we’ll get to it below, but its place here is earned: it didn’t just tell a great story, it reinvented what animated films could look like, and every studio has been chasing it since.

Pixar’s Peak: The Studio That Redefined the Medium

Pixar’s run from 1995 to 2010 is the greatest hot streak in film history — any genre, any studio. The highlights:

WALL-E (2008). The first forty minutes are nearly dialogue-free — a robot love story told through beeps and body language — and it’s perfect. Then it becomes a blistering satire of consumer culture and environmental collapse. That a film this strange became a massive hit is proof audiences are smarter than studios think.

Up (2009). The opening ten minutes — Carl and Ellie’s entire married life, wordlessly — is the most efficient emotional storytelling ever put on screen. The rest is a delightful adventure. But those ten minutes are why the film is immortal.

Ratatouille (2007). A rat who wants to be a chef in Paris. It shouldn’t work; it’s about art, criticism, and the democratic nature of greatness (“anyone can cook”). Anton Ego’s review monologue is the best scene about art ever written — in any medium.

Inside Out (2015). Pixar turned developmental psychology into an adventure film, and in doing so made the definitive movie about emotions for both kids and adults. The Bing Bong scene is devastating because it understands something profound: growing up means losing parts of yourself, and that’s both necessary and sad.

Coco (2017). A love letter to Mexican culture and a devastating meditation on memory and family. The “Remember Me” reveal is engineered to destroy you, and it works every time. Pixar’s most culturally specific film is also its most universal — there’s a lesson there.

Studio Ghibli: Animation as Art Cinema

Miyazaki’s studio operates on a different plane — less interested in jokes-per-minute, more interested in wonder, melancholy, and the texture of being alive.

My Neighbor Totoro (1988). Almost plotless: two girls move to the countryside, befriend a forest spirit, wait for their mother to recover in the hospital. It’s a film about childhood as a state of grace, animated with such loving attention to rain, wind, and light that it feels like a memory. The Catbus remains the greatest fictional vehicle ever designed.

Princess Mononoke (1997). Miyazaki’s epic: no heroes, no villains, just humans and gods and nature in tragic conflict. It’s the most morally complex animated film ever made — every faction has a point, every victory costs something. The animation of the Forest Spirit is transcendent.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988). Not Miyazaki (it’s Isao Takahata), and not for the faint of heart: two children surviving the firebombing of Japan. It’s the saddest animated film ever made and one of the great anti-war films of any kind.

Disney’s Golden Ages

The Renaissance (1989–1994): The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King. Beauty and the Beast remains the only traditionally animated film nominated for Best Picture — and it deserved to win.

The Revival (2010s): Tangled, Frozen, Moana, Zootopia. Zootopia is the standout for adults — a genuinely sharp allegory about prejudice wrapped in a buddy-cop comedy. Moana has the best Disney songs of the modern era and a heroine whose journey is about identity, not romance.

The Modern Revolution: Spider-Verse and Beyond

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) changed everything. Its “living comic book” style — halftone dots, thought boxes, multiple animation styles colliding — proved mainstream audiences would embrace visual experimentation. It won the Oscar, and deservedly: it’s also just a great Spider-Man story about anyone being able to wear the mask.

Across the Spider-Verse (2023) pushed further — every universe with its own art style. The animation industry is still catching up to what these films proved: style is substance, and audiences are hungry for films that look like nothing else.

The ripple effects continue: painterly CG in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) — a shockingly profound meditation on mortality disguised as a fairy-tale sequel — and an industry-wide realization that CG doesn’t have to mean photorealistic plastic.

Other modern essentials: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) — a dark, handmade, stop-motion masterpiece about grief and fascism. The Mitchells vs. the Machines (2021) — the funniest animated film of the decade and a genuinely moving family story. Wolfwalkers (2020) — Cartoon Saloon’s Irish folklore trilogy-closer, hand-drawn and gorgeous.

Hidden Gems You Need to See

• The Iron Giant (1999). Brad Bird’s Cold War fable about a boy and a war machine who chooses to be Superman. Flopped theatrically; now rightly considered a masterpiece. “You are who you choose to be.”
• Rango (2011). Gore Verbinski’s animated western is the strangest big-studio animated film ever made — a lizard’s existential crisis in the desert. Won the Oscar. Deserved it.

The “Just for Kids” Myth (A Rant)

Okay, deep breath, because this one genuinely bothers me.

The idea that animation is a children’s medium is a historical accident — a result of mid-century American marketing, not of the art form itself. Japan never got the memo: anime spans every genre and demographic, from kids’ adventures to horror to erotic drama to meditations on death. European animation never got it either. It’s specifically the American commercial tradition that fenced animation into the kids’ corral, and even that fence has been crumbling for decades.

Here’s what the “just for kids” crowd misses: animation isn’t a genre, it’s a medium — like live action, like prose. Saying animation is for kids is like saying novels are for kids because some novels are for kids.

And the “kids’ movies” themselves? The best ones operate on two tracks simultaneously — joy for children, depth for adults — which is harder than making a film for one audience. Inside Out teaches emotional intelligence better than most therapy. Coco processes grief better than most dramas. Dismissing that as “kids’ stuff” says more about the dismisser than the films.

So no, animation isn’t just for kids. It never was. The only people who think so are people who stopped watching — which, conveniently, means shorter lines for the rest of us at the good screenings.

And if this rant made you curious about the craft behind the magic, how movies are actually made is a rabbit hole worth falling into — plus these filmmaking tips explain why some animated films feel timeless and others feel like tax write-offs.

Frequently Asked Questions