Robert Zemeckis's 1985 comedy sends Marty McFly thirty years into his parents' past, where undoing his own accidental sabotage of their romance becomes a race against his own existence. Recast five weeks into shooting, rewritten forty times before a studio would touch it, it turned into the biggest hit of its year on a modest budget, and the mechanics still hold.
Lilo & Stitch follows an orphaned Hawaiian girl who adopts what she thinks is a stray dog, not realizing he's an escaped, genetically engineered weapon being hunted across the galaxy. Directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, the film cost $80 million, grossed $273 million worldwide, and won an Annie Award, building its story around the Hawaiian concept of extended family rather than a generic redemption arc.
The Polar Express expands Chris Van Allsburg's picture book about a boy's magical Christmas Eve train ride to the North Pole into a full performance-captured feature, using Tom Hanks in six separate roles. Directed by Robert Zemeckis for Castle Rock Entertainment on the highest budget ever given an animated film at the time, it grossed $311 million but drew mixed reviews, with critics divided over its motion-capture human faces.
Robert Zemeckis's 1988 noir comedy places a toon-hating private eye in an alternate 1947 Hollywood where cartoon characters live alongside humans, tasking him with clearing Roger Rabbit of a murder. Produced by Disney and Amblin with animation supervised by Richard Williams, it required Disney to negotiate cameo rights with Warner Bros. and other studios, and became the second-highest-grossing film of 1988.