Best Animated Movies of All Time

Animation doesn’t have a ceiling. Every time someone tries to put one up, a film comes along and punches through it. The ten movies on this list represent decades of proof that animated storytelling can match or surpass anything live-action has to offer, whether the measure is visual ambition, emotional depth, or the ability to make a grown adult cry over a robot holding a plant.

These films span from 1991 to 2018, covering hand-drawn fairy tales, computer-generated comedies, stop-motion musicals, and a superhero film that looked like nothing anyone had seen before. Their BuzzVerdict ratings range from 4.5 to 4.8 stars. Some became the biggest movies of their year on release. Others flopped hard and spent years earning the audience they deserved. All of them changed what people expected animation could do.

How Disney’s Renaissance Rewrote the Rules of Animated Musicals

The early 1990s produced two Disney films that sit at the very top of the studio’s catalog, and both of them leaned on music so heavily that their scores and songs became inseparable from their identities.

Beauty and the Beast did something in 1991 that no animated film had done before: it earned a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards, during a year when the category held only five slots. That wasn’t a gesture of goodwill toward animation. It was an acknowledgment that Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise had directed a film capable of competing with the best work in any format. Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s songs drive the story forward with a dramatic purpose that goes beyond being catchy. “Belle” establishes the heroine’s intelligence and her isolation from a small-minded village in a single number. “Gaston” is hilarious and quietly unsettling, painting narcissism so effectively that an entire town mistakes it for heroism. The famous ballroom dance sequence, blending hand-drawn characters with CGI backgrounds, created a sense of depth and movement that was unprecedented at the time. Belle herself is curious, stubborn, and brave in ways that serve the story rather than feeling like a checklist, and the central romance earns its emotional weight by building through small shared moments rather than grand declarations.

Three years later, The Lion King became the highest-grossing traditionally animated film of all time and won two Academy Awards for its music. Hans Zimmer’s score drew on African vocal traditions, most notably the work of South African vocalist Lebo M, to create something Disney had never attempted. Elton John and Tim Rice wrote songs that became permanent fixtures in popular culture. “Circle of Life” opens the film with a sequence so powerful that many people consider it the greatest opening in animated film history. The voice cast is perfectly assembled. James Earl Jones brings warmth and gravity to Mufasa, Jeremy Irons plays Scar with intelligence and menace, and Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella bring real comedic chemistry as Timon and Pumbaa. Mufasa’s death remains one of those rare movie moments that transcends its medium, hitting children hard enough to become a defining first encounter with grief and hitting adults hard enough that it still provokes a real response on the tenth rewatch. The second half can’t quite sustain the brilliance of the first act, and Simba’s growth feels compressed, but neither flaw has stopped this film from shaping how entire generations think about animation.

Pixar’s Long Run of Creative Bravery

No studio has taken bigger creative swings in animation than Pixar, and these four films represent the range of what those swings have produced.

Toy Story launched everything in 1995. The first fully computer-animated feature film could have coasted on novelty alone, but Pixar built it on sharp writing, perfect voice casting, and a story about jealousy and friendship that connects on a gut level. Tom Hanks gave Woody a sincerity that grounded even the character’s worst behavior, and Tim Allen’s confident bluster made Buzz Lightyear’s eventual identity crisis land with real force. At 81 minutes, there isn’t a wasted scene. The humor works on two levels, landing for kids through physical comedy while sneaking in wit aimed at adults. The animation has aged in spots, particularly the human characters, but the emotional architecture hasn’t lost a step in three decades.

WALL-E arrived in 2008 and spent its first forty minutes in near-total silence, following a small trash-compacting robot on an empty Earth. Andrew Stanton studied the silent films of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin before production, and the influence shows in every frame. Ben Burtt’s sound design, built from over 2,400 individual sound files, gave WALL-E a “voice” that communicates curiosity, loneliness, and affection entirely through whirs and beeps. The love story between WALL-E and EVE, told almost entirely through gestures and the repetition of each other’s names, is among the most emotionally affecting romances in animation. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Its spaceship sequences don’t quite match the brilliance of those early Earth scenes, but the highs are so extraordinary that the dips barely register.

Inside Out took Pixar’s ambition in a completely different direction in 2015. Set almost entirely inside the mind of an eleven-year-old girl, the film personified five emotions and built an internal world of staggering inventiveness. Long-term memories stored as glowing orbs. Personality Islands representing the pillars of identity. A literal Train of Thought running on self-generating tracks. Amy Poehler brought infectious energy to Joy, Phyllis Smith turned Sadness into the film’s secret weapon, and Richard Kind voiced an imaginary friend whose arc became one of Pixar’s most discussed moments. The film’s central argument, that sadness is a necessary part of emotional health rather than something to suppress, is delivered without a trace of condescension. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and earned a nomination for Best Original Screenplay, and parents frequently cite its message about emotional intelligence as the most valuable thing it offers.

Brad Bird’s Ratatouille has a premise that sounds like it shouldn’t work. A rat who dreams of becoming a chef sneaks into a famous Parisian restaurant and, through an unlikely partnership with a clumsy garbage boy, starts producing dishes that stun everyone who tastes them. Bird’s script treats its audience with unusual respect, exploring ambition, creative integrity, and the tension between following your passion and existing in a world that doesn’t think you belong. Patton Oswalt brought warmth and determination to Remy, while Peter O’Toole was magnetic as Anton Ego, the gaunt food critic whose climactic scene became one of the most emotionally effective moments in Pixar’s catalog. Ego takes a bite of the titular dish, and the film cuts to a childhood memory, his mother’s kitchen, a simple meal that meant everything. No dialogue. Just music and images. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and earned over $620 million worldwide.

The Brilliant Failures That Became Legends

Two of the best animated films ever made were ignored on arrival. Both eventually proved the world wrong through sheer quality and stubborn word of mouth.

Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant earned roughly $31 million against a $50 million budget in 1999 after Warner Bros. fumbled the marketing. By any commercial measure, it was a failure. By every other measure, it was something close to a masterpiece. A lonely kid in a small Maine town discovers a massive metal visitor from space, and their friendship unfolds with patience and care that avoids the saccharine tendencies of most family films. Bird’s script explores heavy ideas about identity, choice, and the nature of violence without ever lecturing, and the Cold War setting gives those themes historical grounding that makes the government’s fear of the Giant feel organic. Vin Diesel’s voice work, delivered with a limited vocabulary, communicates warmth, confusion, fear, and resolve through tone and timing alone. The film builds toward a climactic choice rooted in a single word, a scene that reduces adults to tears with reliable consistency because the entire runtime spent building toward it honestly.

The Nightmare Before Christmas opened in 1993 under a secondary studio banner because Disney worried it was too dark for children. It earned modest box office numbers and seemed headed for cult obscurity. Instead, it became a phenomenon that spans two holidays and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Danny Elfman wrote the songs and provided Jack Skellington’s singing voice, producing some of the finest musical writing in animation. “This Is Halloween” became the definitive Halloween anthem. “What’s This?” captures the wonder of discovery with an energy that’s impossible to resist. Henry Selick’s stop-motion animation is extraordinary, with character designs that are simultaneously grotesque and charming. Jack himself resonates because his problem is universal. He’s excellent at what he does but bored by it, and his desire to be something else leads him to appropriate a culture he doesn’t understand. The film treats his enthusiasm with affection rather than mockery, which is why his failure feels melancholy rather than deserved. At 76 minutes, it wastes nothing.

Two Films That Shattered Animation’s Visual Boundaries

Separated by seventeen years, these two Academy Award winners share something essential. Both pushed the visual possibilities of animation further than anyone thought possible, and both grounded their experiments in stories with real emotional weight.

Spirited Away arrived in 2001 and became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history. Hayao Miyazaki’s animated fantasy won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, becoming the first hand-drawn, non-English-language animated film to claim that Oscar. Every frame was drawn by hand at Studio Ghibli, and the level of detail is staggering. Backgrounds are dense with texture and color, and the spirit world bathhouse feels like a place with its own rhythms and routines. Chihiro’s character arc is the emotional engine: a scared, whiny child who becomes resourceful and brave through small acts of kindness and persistence. Miyazaki trusts his audience to absorb the film’s themes of greed, identity, and the loss of innocence through the story rather than through speeches, and that restraint is a big part of why the film resonates so widely across cultures. Joe Hisaishi’s score moves between wonder, melancholy, and joy with an ease that mirrors Miyazaki’s own tonal shifts. Some Western viewers struggle with the loose narrative structure and unexplained cultural specificity, but the overwhelming majority walk away calling it one of the best animated films ever made.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse did something equally radical in 2018, creating a visual style that had never been attempted at this scale. Blending computer-generated imagery with hand-drawn techniques, it built a world that looks like a comic book in motion, complete with visible dot patterns, bold motion lines, and onscreen sound effects. Characters are rendered at different frame rates depending on their experience level. Miles Morales moves choppily at first, still figuring out his powers, while veteran Spider-people flow smoothly through action. Miles is awkward, funny, scared, and determined in ways that feel specific rather than generic, and his relationship with his father carries more emotional weight than any supervillain showdown in the film. Jake Johnson’s Peter B. Parker, an older, divorced, out-of-shape version of Spider-Man, serves as a reluctant mentor whose dynamic with Miles gives the film both its comedic backbone and some of its most affecting moments. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and convinced an entire industry that animation could have a completely original visual identity. Studios began taking bigger visual risks almost immediately.

Why These Ten Films Still Matter

Every film on this list took a gamble. Some bet on silence over dialogue. Some bet on stop-motion in a CGI world, or on African choral arrangements in a medium dominated by pop songs, or on a rat who wanted to cook French cuisine. What connects them is that each one treated animation as a medium with unlimited potential rather than a genre with built-in limitations. They asked audiences to feel something real through drawings, pixels, and puppets, and they delivered. Thirty years from now, people will still be watching them and still discovering why they work. That’s not nostalgia. That’s craft.