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Fiction

Animation

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1365 min: in total
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Invention for Destruction

Karel Zeman · 1958

Invention for Destruction (1958) is a Czechoslovak science fiction film directed by Karel Zeman, adapting Jules Verne not literally but visually — recreating the line-engraved aesthetic of nineteenth-century editions through hand-textured sets, stop-motion, matte paintings and stylised performance. Starring Lubor Tokoš and Miloslav Holub, it follows an inventor’s quest to prevent a weapon of mass destruction, using Verne’s submarines, airships and volcanic islands as stages for a unified graphic vision. Scored by Zdeněk Liška and shot by Jiří Tarantík, it remains a landmark of animated integration and period-specific worldbuilding.

Journey to the Beginning of Time

Karel Zeman · 1955

Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955) is a Czechoslovak science fiction film directed by Karel Zeman, in which four teenagers row up a river that carries them backward through geological time. Using a blend of live action, stop-motion, 2-D cut-outs, and studio sets—all inspired by palaeo-artist Zdeněk Burian—it illustrates prehistoric life with scientific rigour and visual coherence. The film avoids narrative convention in favour of pedagogical sequencing, treating epochs as habitats and observation as method. Though modest in budget and scope, its integration of craft, content, and calm authority makes it a landmark of cinematic science communication.

King of Jazz

John Murray Anderson, Paul Fejos · 1930

King of Jazz (1930) is a studio-made musical revue starring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, filmed in early two-colour Technicolor. With no plot, it strings together musical numbers, blackout sketches, and novelty acts—including the first Technicolor animated segment, featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Though technically ambitious and historically significant (selected for the US National Film Registry in 2013), its static camerawork, dated humour, and promotional framing make it a demanding watch. Its value lies in preservation: as a record of early sound-film craft, Whiteman’s curated jazz, and the industrial logic of Hollywood’s transition to colour.

KPop Demon Hunters

Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang · 2025

KPop Demon Hunters is a 2025 Sony Pictures Animation film co-directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans. It follows Huntrix, a K-pop girl group who double as demon hunters rooted in Korean folklore, as they confront the Saja Boys — boy-band idols secretly tied to the jeoseung saja. Animated in a bold 3D style inspired by music videos and Korean drama, with songs and score by Marcelo Zarvos, it blends myth, music, and modernity. Released on Netflix, it won Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song at both the Golden Globes and Oscars.

The Fabulous Baron Munchausen

Karel Zeman · 1962

Karel Zeman’s 1962 The Fabulous Baron Munchausen reimagines the legendary raconteur as a conductor of visual worlds, not a teller of lies. Using live-action actors layered into hand-drawn, animated, and lithographic backdrops inspired by Gustave Doré, the film follows a cosmonaut who lands on the Moon and is escorted by Baron Munchausen through a fantastical, anachronistic Ottoman Empire. With music by Zdeněk Liška and cinematography by Jiří Tarantík, it privileges texture, rhythm, and stylistic unity over psychological realism or narrative drive — a meticulously crafted, gently satirical celebration of storytelling as craft.

WALL-E

Andrew Stanton · 2008

WALL-E is a 2008 Pixar animated science-fiction romance set in a depopulated future, following a waste-collecting robot who discovers love and purpose after encountering an exploratory probe. Directed by Andrew Stanton, it uses minimal dialogue, expressive sound design, and layered visual storytelling to explore ecological neglect, automation, and human atrophy. Its first act unfolds on a ruined Earth; its second aboard the sterile starship Axiom; its third in the fragile, hopeful return to ground. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was added to the US National Film Registry in 2021.

Anomalisa

Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson · 2015

A middle-aged man perceives everyone as identical—same face, same voice—except one woman he meets in a Cincinnati hotel. Adapted from Charlie Kaufman’s 2005 audio play, this stop-motion feature renders alienation as tactile, acoustic and temporal experience, using painstaking puppetry and vocal repetition to explore perception, loneliness and the fragile mechanics of connection.

Entr'acte

René Clair · 1924

A 1924 French Dada short directed by René Clair, made as a prologue and entr’acte for the Ballets Suédois production of Relâche. Twenty-two minutes of silent, non-narrative experimentation: reverse motion, tilted frames, rooftop absurdities, and Erik Satie’s score. Cameos by Duchamp, Man Ray, Satie, and Picabia. It treats cinema as a site of playful sabotage — not storytelling, but syntax-breaking.

Frankenweenie

Tim Burton · 2012

Tim Burton’s 2012 stop-motion Frankenweenie expands his 1984 short into a black-and-white feature about Victor Frankenstein, a lonely boy who reanimates his dead dog Sparky — then contends with chaos when classmates follow suit. Built with meticulous puppetry and Danny Elfman’s score, it balances gothic parody with emotional sincerity, landing most strongly in its tactile detail and restrained treatment of loss. Though some subplots feel schematic and its satire stays broad, its commitment to mood, materiality, and moral ambiguity makes it a distinctive, unhurried piece of animation.

Akira

Katsuhiro Otomo · 1988

Akira is Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 adaptation of his own unfinished manga, following biker-gang leader Kaneda as he tries to stop his friend Tetsuo, whose collision with an escaped psychic child leaves him with telekinetic power that threatens to destroy Neo-Tokyo. A landmark of Japanese animation on its original release, it has grown into one of the most influential science-fiction films of its era.

Alice in Wonderland

Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske · 1951

A bored young girl follows a white rabbit down a hole into a nonsensical kingdom ruled by a short-tempered Queen of Hearts, encountering a parade of self-absorbed creatures along the way. Disney first considered adapting Lewis Carroll's books in the early 1930s and spent nearly two decades discarding drafts — a live-action hybrid with Mary Pickford, a literal script judged too grotesque, a version written by Aldous Huxley — before settling on the fully animated, more comic take released in 1951 to a muted box office and mixed reviews that only later warmed.

Arrietty

Hiromasa Yonebayashi · 2010

A tiny Borrower named Arrietty risks everything her family fears by letting herself be seen by a sickly human boy. Hiromasa Yonebayashi's 2010 directorial debut, based on Mary Norton's novel, trades Ghibli's usual scale for something quieter and more contained.

Bambi

David Hand, James Algar, Bill Roberts, Norman Wright · 1942

Bambi follows a white-tailed deer from birth through the loss of his mother to his eventual place as the forest's next Great Prince, told with almost no reliance on plot mechanics and long stretches of near-silent observation. Adapted loosely from Felix Salten's considerably grimmer novel, the film took years longer than planned because Disney's animators had to learn to draw deer realistically rather than as the flour-sack shapes they'd used before, studying live animals and building an in-house menagerie to get the movement right.

Beauty and the Beast

Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise · 1991

Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise's 1991 musical retelling of the French fairy tale follows Belle as she trades her freedom for her father's release and slowly reconsiders the beast holding her captive. Written from a completed script by Linda Woolverton and scored by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, it became the first animated film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Big Hero 6

Chris Williams, Don Hall · 2014

A robotics prodigy grieving his brother's death assembles a makeshift team, led by a soft, inflatable healthcare robot named Baymax, to confront the person responsible. Don Hall and Chris Williams's 2014 film sets its Marvel-derived plot in a hybrid San Francisco-Tokyo city and keeps its emotional focus on loss rather than spectacle.

Castle in the Sky

Hayao Miyazaki · 1986

Hayao Miyazaki's 1986 debut for Studio Ghibli follows orphans Sheeta and Pazu as a government agent, the army and a band of air pirates all chase the crystal pendant that unlocks Laputa, a legendary castle adrift above the clouds. It underperformed on release but has since become a Ghibli staple, prized for its nineteenth-century-engineered flying machines and Joe Hisaishi's score.

Chicken Run

Peter Lord, Nick Park · 2000

Chicken Run reworks the World War Two escape film as a story about hens on a Yorkshire egg farm run like a prison camp, who pin their hopes of freedom on a crash-landed American rooster claiming he can fly. Aardman's first feature, directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park, was shot in stop-motion across thirty sets over eighteen months and became the highest-grossing stop-motion film ever made, taking $225 million against a $45 million budget.

Cinderella

Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi · 1950

A servant in her own home waits out her stepmother's cruelty until a fairy godmother gives her one night at the palace ball, in the version of Perrault's fairy tale Disney finally completed in 1950 after years of false starts. Made for $2.2 million while the studio was roughly $4 million in debt, the film became Disney's biggest hit since Snow White and reversed a run of expensive, underperforming features — helped along by nearly 380 women auditioning for the title role before Ilene Woods got it almost by accident.

Coco

Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina · 2017

Twelve-year-old Miguel, banned from music by his shoemaking family, is pulled into the Land of the Dead on the Day of the Dead and has to win his deceased great-great-grandfather's blessing before sunrise or be trapped there. Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina's Pixar feature, developed over years of research trips to Mexico and a cultural consultant group formed after a trademark controversy, builds its fantasy rules around a specific, sourced idea: that the dead persist only as long as someone living remembers them.

Coraline

Henry Selick · 2009

A girl finds a door to an alternate version of her home where everything, including her parents, is more attentive and colourful, until she learns the price. Henry Selick's 2009 stop-motion film, based on Neil Gaiman's novella, builds dread through craft rather than jump scares.

Corpse Bride

Tim Burton, Mike Johnson · 2005

Corpse Bride follows Victor, an anxious young man in an arranged marriage, who accidentally weds a murdered woman named Emily after placing a ring on what he thinks is a tree root, then must choose between her vivid Land of the Dead and his living fiancée. Co-directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson for Laika on a $40 million budget, shot on digital cameras rather than film, it grossed $118 million and drew three award nominations.

Encanto

Jared Bush, Byron Howard, Charise Castro Smith · 2021

In a hidden Colombian valley, the Madrigal family's magic house grants every grandchild a power except Mirabel, who sets out to learn why the magic is failing. Directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard built the story from a research trip through Colombia, with Lin-Manuel Miranda's songs doing the work of introducing a dozen major characters.

Fantasia

James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr., Norm Ferguson · 1940

Fantasia sets eight animated sequences to classical pieces conducted by Leopold Stokowski, introduced on screen by critic Deems Taylor, ranging from abstract shapes moving to Bach to dancing hippos set to Ponchielli. It began as The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a Mickey Mouse vehicle whose spiralling budget only made sense as part of something larger; Disney and RCA built a pioneering multi-speaker sound system, Fantasound, specifically to give the film's roadshow release a sound quality no cinema of 1940 otherwise offered.

Fantastic Animation Festival

Dean A. Berko, Christopher Padilla · 1977

Released theatrically in 1977, this package film strings together sixteen animated shorts by different filmmakers, including the national debut of Will Vinton's Claymation, the cult short Bambi Meets Godzilla, and a Cat Stevens-scored promo narrated by Spike Milligan. Directed by Dean A. Berko and Christopher Padilla, it helped establish the animation-anthology format later continued by Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson · 2009

George Clooney voices a fox whose one last heist against three farmers turns into a siege on his whole underground community. Wes Anderson's 2009 stop-motion adaptation of Roald Dahl keeps the plot but reshapes the tone into something drier and more personal.

Fantastic Planet

René Laloux · 1973

On the planet Ygam, humans called Oms are kept as pets or exterminated as vermin by the giant Draags, until an orphaned Om named Terr escapes his owner with a stolen education headset and helps organise a rebellion. René Laloux directed this 1973 French-Czechoslovak co-production, animated at Prague's Jiří Trnka Studio from designs by Roland Topor, based on Stefan Wul's 1957 novel Oms en série.

Finding Nemo

Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich · 2003

Finding Nemo follows an overprotective clownfish, Marlin, across the ocean to rescue his son Nemo after a diver captures him, aided by Dory, a fish whose short-term memory resets constantly. Directed by Andrew Stanton for Pixar from a script written before serious animation began, the film grossed $969 million against a $94 million budget, became the best-selling DVD title ever, and won the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Flee

Jonas Poher Rasmussen · 2021

Jonas Poher Rasmussen interviews a friend given the alias Amin Nawabi about fleeing Afghanistan as a child, animating every session so Amin can finally correct the official story he told Danish authorities for decades. Archival footage of the Soviet-Afghan war anchors the drawn reconstructions in verifiable history.

Flow

Gints Zilbalodis · 2024

A solitary cat, fleeing dogs and a sudden flood, ends up sharing a small boat with a capybara, a lemur, a secretarybird and a dog as the water keeps rising around a seemingly abandoned world. Gints Zilbalodis made the film with no storyboards and no dialogue, animating it in the free software Blender over five and a half years on a budget of 3.5 million euros.

Frozen

Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee · 2013

Two royal sisters are separated by one sister's uncontrollable ice powers, and the younger one sets out to bring her home rather than defeat her. Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee's 2013 film reworks Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen into a story about repair between siblings rather than romance.

Ghost in the Shell

Mamoru Oshii · 1995

Ghost in the Shell follows Major Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg security agent, as she pursues a mysterious hacker called the Puppet Master through a near-future city modelled on Hong Kong, a case that increasingly unsettles her sense of what makes her identity her own. Mamoru Oshii directed the adaptation of Masamune Shirow's manga for Production I.G, using a hybrid digital animation process and a score by Kenji Kawai built around classical Japanese vocals. Initially considered a box-office disappointment, it became a defining cult film, influencing The Matrix and drawing praise from James Cameron as one of animation's first truly adult works.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson · 2022

Carved by a grieving Geppetto from the tree growing over his dead son's grave, this stop-motion Pinocchio is rowdy, disobedient and impossible to control, set against the rise of Fascist Italy. Fourteen years in development before Netflix financed it, the film keeps Collodi's darkness rather than softening it into a straightforward morality tale.

How to Train Your Dragon

Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders · 2010

An undersized Viking teenager befriends the rare dragon he was supposed to kill, and in doing so undoes his village's entire way of understanding its enemy. Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders's 2010 film pairs a straightforward friendship story with unusually grounded visual craft.

Howl's Moving Castle

Hayao Miyazaki · 2004

Howl's Moving Castle adapts Diana Wynne Jones's novel about a young milliner cursed into old age by a witch, who ends up living in a wizard's walking castle as a war between two kingdoms escalates around them. Hayao Miyazaki directed the film for Studio Ghibli after an earlier director departed, and it took $236 million against a $24 million budget, becoming one of the most commercially successful Japanese films ever made and winning a Nebula Award for Best Script.

Inside Out

Pete Docter, Ronnie del Carmen · 2015

Riley Andersen's move from Minnesota to San Francisco throws her mental control room into crisis when Joy and Sadness are accidentally flung from headquarters, forcing them to find their way back through the wreckage of her long-term memory. Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen's Pixar feature spends five personified emotions and a five-and-a-half-year production trying to dramatise, rather than explain, why a child needs to be allowed to feel bad.

Isle of Dogs

Wes Anderson · 2018

A dictatorial mayor exiles every dog in the fictional Japanese city of Megasaki to Trash Island over a manufactured flu outbreak, and his own twelve-year-old ward hijacks a plane to find his banished bodyguard dog among them. Wes Anderson's second stop-motion feature, drawing openly on Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki, pairs meticulous handcrafted puppetry with a plot about political corruption and canine loyalty, while drawing sustained criticism for how it handles the Japanese setting and characters within it.

Kiki's Delivery Service

Hayao Miyazaki · 1989

Hayao Miyazaki's 1989 film follows thirteen-year-old witch Kiki as she leaves home to complete a year of independent training in a coastal city, running a flying courier service with her cat Jiji. Miyazaki rewrote Eiko Kadono's more episodic novel to centre on the strain of independence itself, and the film became the first Studio Ghibli release to succeed commercially on first release.

Klaus

Sergio Pablos · 2019

A spoiled postal cadet exiled to a feuding Arctic town discovers that a reclusive toymaker's handmade gifts can be used to bribe warring children into good behaviour, and the scheme he runs to hit his delivery quota accidentally invents Christmas as it is now understood. Sergio Pablos, directing after years animating for Disney's hand-drawn era, built Klaus specifically to argue that traditional animation, sidelined industry-wide since the 1990s, still had a commercial future.

Kubo and the Two Strings

Travis Knight · 2016

In a fictionalised feudal Japan, a one-eyed boy named Kubo earns a living by animating paper figures with music, until his grandfather's ghostly aunts arrive to finish what took his eye in infancy. Travis Knight's directorial debut for Laika pairs handmade stop-motion craft, inspired by ukiyo-e woodblock printing, with a quest plot that leans harder on grief and loss than most animated adventures aimed at children.

Lilo & Stitch

Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois · 2002

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.

Loving Vincent

Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman · 2017

A postman's reluctant son delivers Vincent van Gogh's last letter a year after the painter's suicide and, meeting the people who knew him in his final weeks, starts doubting the official account of how he died. Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's Loving Vincent is the first fully painted animated feature, built from oil paintings made in Van Gogh's own technique over sixty-five thousand hand-shot frames, a six-year production that treats the investigation plot mainly as scaffolding for its visual project.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Dean Fleischer Camp · 2021

A documentary filmmaker moves into an Airbnb and finds Marcel, a talking, one-inch-tall shell living there with his grandmother Connie, and starts filming his daily routines. When the resulting videos make Marcel briefly famous, he has to decide whether that attention can actually help him find the family he lost years earlier.

Millennium Actress

Satoshi Kon · 2001

Millennium Actress frames a documentary crew's interview with a reclusive retired film star as the occasion for her life story, then dissolves the line between her memories and the film roles she played until the two run as one continuous narrative. Satoshi Kon's first original film after Perfect Blue, made at Madhouse on one of the lowest budgets recorded for a Japanese animated feature, it won the Animation Kobe award and holds a 93% critical score despite a tiny US theatrical release.

Mirai of the Future

Mamoru Hosoda · 2018

Kun, four years old and furious at the attention his newborn sister Mirai is getting, starts slipping into the family garden and meeting relatives out of chronological order: a teenage future version of Mirai, his mother as a scolded little girl, his great-grandfather as a young man. Mamoru Hosoda, drawing directly on watching his own son react to a new sibling, builds the film's fantasy elements not as escape from Kun's anger but as a way of walking him back through it.

Monsters, Inc.

Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, David Silverman · 2001

Monsters, Inc. imagines child-scaring as an actual industry, converting screams into a city's power supply, until a small girl named Boo slips into the factory and forces two scarers to smuggle her home before anyone notices. Directed by Pete Docter for Pixar over a five-year production, the film cost $115 million, took $632 million worldwide, and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Mulan

Barry Cook, Tony Bancroft · 1998

Mulan follows a young woman who takes her ailing father's place in an Imperial army conscription by posing as a man, running that story through the machinery of a late-90s Disney musical. Directed by Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft and produced largely at Disney's Florida studio, it paired a $90 million budget with $304 million in worldwide takings and the Annie Award for Best Animated Feature.

My Neighbor Totoro

Hayao Miyazaki · 1988

Released on a double bill with Grave of the Fireflies in 1988, Hayao Miyazaki's film follows sisters Satsuki and Mei as they move to the countryside while their mother recovers in hospital, and meet the forest spirits living around their new home. It grossed a modest sum on first release but has since become Studio Ghibli's signature work, with Totoro serving as the studio's mascot.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Hayao Miyazaki · 1984

A thousand years after industrial civilisation collapsed, Princess Nausicaä tries to keep her small valley out of a war between an empire determined to burn a toxic jungle and the giant insects that guard it. Miyazaki wrote and directed the film from his own still-unfinished manga, with only sixteen chapters of story to draw from and a production schedule of nine months on a budget under a million dollars, working with composer Joe Hisaishi for the first time and with the minor studio Topcraft rather than a major animation house.

Nimona

Nick Bruno, Troy Quane · 2023

Framed for the Queen's murder, disgraced knight Ballister teams up with Nimona, a shapeshifter with no interest in explaining herself, to clear his name in a medieval-futuristic kingdom. Originally a Blue Sky Studios production cancelled when Disney shut the studio down in 2021, the film was revived by Annapurna and Netflix and completed by a new creative team.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians

Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, Wolfgang Reitherman · 1961

Two London Dalmatians, Pongo and Perdita, cross the country to rescue their kidnapped puppies from the fur-obsessed socialite Cruella de Vil, picking up 84 more stolen Dalmatians along the way. Adapted from Dodie Smith's novel by Bill Peet, the only writer credited on the finished script, the film used a new Xerox transfer process to keep costs down after Sleeping Beauty's expensive failure had studio executives openly discussing whether animation was worth continuing at all — and the film's box-office success settled that question decisively.

Paprika

Satoshi Kon · 2006

A stolen dream-sharing device lets a psychologist's alter ego, the detective Paprika, chase a saboteur through other people's nightmares. Satoshi Kon's 2006 feature, adapted from Yasutaka Tsutsui's novel, folds one dream into another until the seams between them disappear.

Perfect Blue

Satoshi Kon · 1997

Perfect Blue follows Mima Kirigoe, a retiring pop idol turned actress, as an obsessive fan's stalking and a string of murders around her erode her ability to distinguish memory from fabrication. Satoshi Kon directed his first feature from Sadayuki Murai's screenplay, reworking an inherited splatter-horror premise into a study of the victim's collapsing perspective rather than the stalker's psychology. Made on a budget of roughly $830,000, it under-performed commercially before building a lasting reputation as one of animation's most influential psychological thrillers, cited as an inspiration by Darren Aronofsky.

Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud · 2007

Adapted from her own graphic novel, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's 2007 film follows a girl growing up through the Iranian Revolution, the war with Iraq, and years of exile in Vienna. Hand-drawn black and white carries most of the film's argument about who this story belongs to.

Peter Pan

Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske · 1953

Wendy Darling and her brothers follow Peter Pan to Never Land to escape growing up, then have to help him outwit Captain Hook once they're there. Disney bought the animation rights from Paramount in 1938 and began preliminary work almost immediately, only for the Second World War to divert the studio into government propaganda work for years; production finally resumed after 1945 and the finished film, made for $4 million, became a solid commercial success while carrying a depiction of its Native American characters that has drawn deserved criticism since.

Pinocchio

Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske, Norm Ferguson, T. Hee · 1940

A woodcarver's puppet is brought to life and told he must prove himself brave, truthful and unselfish before he can become a real boy, guided — imperfectly — by a cricket appointed as his conscience. Made for $2.5 million as Disney's second feature, the film pushed effects animation further than Snow White had, rendering water, smoke and lightning with a level of realism the studio hadn't attempted before, even as it lost money on first release when the war cut off its overseas markets.

Pom Poko

Isao Takahata · 1994

Pom Poko follows a colony of shapeshifting tanuki in the hills outside Tokyo as they organize, and ultimately fail, to stop a suburban development project from destroying their forest home across three decades. Isao Takahata wrote and directed for Studio Ghibli, drawing on Japanese bake-danuki folklore and crediting several folklorists and illustrators for the tanuki's designs and lore. The film topped Japan's box office in 1994, taking in ¥4.47 billion, and won the Grand Prix at Annecy the following year.

Princess Mononoke

Hayao Miyazaki · 1997

Princess Mononoke follows Ashitaka, a young prince cursed by a demonized boar god, as he travels west and becomes caught in the war between Lady Eboshi's ironworks town and the animal gods defending their forest, including San, a girl raised by wolves. Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed the film for Studio Ghibli after nearly two decades of development, using limited computer-generated imagery alongside hand-drawn animation for the first time in his work. Marketed by producer Toshio Suzuki in the largest advertising campaign Japan had seen for a film at that point, it became the country's highest-grossing release and the first Ghibli film given a wide international release, through a Disney-brokered deal that handed its English dub to novelist Neil Gaiman.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Joel Crawford · 2022

Down to his last of nine lives, Puss in Boots teams up with Kitty Softpaws and an unflappably cheerful dog named Perrito to chase the Wishing Star's last wish, while a wolf who is actually Death hunts him across a string of fairy-tale locations. Director Joel Crawford borrowed the painterly, Spider-Verse-influenced visual style DreamWorks had just built for The Bad Guys.

Rango

Gore Verbinski · 2011

A pet chameleon stranded in the desert invents a tough-guy persona to survive a lawless town, and the fiction becomes real enough to matter. Gore Verbinski's 2011 animated Western leans on genre homage and an unusually cinematic visual approach for an animated film.

Ratatouille

Brad Bird, Jan Pinkava · 2007

Remy, a rat with a chef's palate, teams up with a hapless kitchen boy to cook at a Paris restaurant neither of them is supposed to be running. Brad Bird's 2007 film pairs slapstick with unusually sincere arguments about taste, talent and where either one is allowed to come from.

Robin Hood

Wolfgang Reitherman · 1973

Wolfgang Reitherman's 1973 Robin Hood turns the English outlaw tale into a musical fox-and-wolf caper, the first Disney feature made without Walt Disney's guidance and the first built entirely around animal stand-ins for a human cast. Cheaply made and visibly recycled from earlier Disney films, it survived mixed reviews at release to become a durable cult favourite.

Robot Dreams

Pablo Berger · 2023

In 1985 Manhattan, a lonely dog orders a robot companion by mail, and the two become inseparable until a day at the beach leaves the robot rusted, stranded and eventually lost to a junkyard. Pablo Berger adapts Sara Varon's 2007 graphic novel entirely without dialogue, built around the recurring pull of Earth, Wind and Fire's September.

Shaun the Sheep Movie

Richard Starzak, Mark Burton · 2015

When a scheme to win the flock a day off sends their amnesiac farmer rolling into the city inside his own caravan, Shaun and Bitzer follow him into a world built for humans, disguised as people, while an animal control officer closes in. Richard Starzak and Mark Burton's stop-motion feature keeps the television series' silence intact across eighty-five minutes, betting the visual gag can hold a full plot rather than just a sketch.

Shrek

Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson · 2001

Shrek expands William Steig's picture book into a feature that spends most of its runtime mocking the Disney fairy-tale formula it also structurally depends on, following an ogre who strikes a deal to rescue a princess in exchange for getting his swamp back. Directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson for DreamWorks, it grossed $484 million against a $60 million budget and became the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Sleeping Beauty

Clyde Geronimi, Les Clark, Eric Larson, Wolfgang Reitherman · 1959

Princess Aurora is cursed at birth to die by a spinning wheel's needle, saved instead by three fairies who soften the curse to a deep sleep breakable only by true love's kiss, while the evil fairy Maleficent works to see the original curse fulfilled anyway. Designed around Eyvind Earle's tapestry-like visual style, drawing on pre-Renaissance European art, and scored using Tchaikovsky's 1889 ballet, the film took nearly ten years and $6 million to complete, making it Disney's most expensive animated feature at the time — and, on release, one of its most costly failures.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

David Hand, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey · 1937

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs follows the fairy-tale plot closely — a jealous queen, a poisoned apple, seven miners who take in a runaway princess — but its significance is in what it proved possible: a full-length animated feature with distinct character personalities, made for $1.5 million after two years of story meetings that discarded far more ideas than they kept. Industry figures dismissed it in advance as Disney's Folly; it opened at the Carthay Circle Theatre in December 1937 and changed what a cartoon was allowed to be.

Soul

Pete Docter · 2020

Joe Gardner, a middle-school band teacher on the verge of his first real break as a jazz pianist, falls into a coma and finds his soul on the way to the Great Beyond, prompting a scramble to get back to his body paired with an unwilling mentee soul named 22 who has never wanted to be born. Pete Docter's Pixar feature, co-written and co-directed by Kemp Powers, spends four years of production building an afterlife bureaucracy in order to undercut the very idea, common to Docter's own earlier films, that a person needs a defining passion to justify their existence.

South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

Trey Parker · 1999

Trey Parker and Matt Stone expand their Comedy Central series into a full musical: four boys learn a stream of profanity from an R-rated movie, a parental panic follows, and the United States ends up declaring war on Canada. Made for $21 million and released by Paramount, it took $83 million worldwide and became the highest-grossing R-rated animated film at the time, earning an Academy Award nomination for the song Blame Canada.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson · 2022

Miles Morales crosses into a multiverse-spanning Spider-Society alongside Gwen Stacy, only to find that the group's leader believes certain tragedies must happen exactly on schedule to hold reality together. Built with roughly a thousand crew members and six visually distinct animated universes, it became the highest-grossing film Sony Pictures Animation has released.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, Bob Persichetti · 2018

After a radioactive spider bite and Peter Parker's death at the hands of Kingpin, Brooklyn teenager Miles Morales is thrown together with five other Spider-People pulled in from parallel universes to stop a machine that threatens to destroy them all. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's screenplay, directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman, pairs a six-Spider-Man ensemble with a hand-drawn comic-book visual technique built specifically to make computer animation look like it was inked and printed.

Spirited Away

Hayao Miyazaki · 2001

Spirited Away follows ten-year-old Chihiro, whose parents are turned into pigs after wandering into a spirit world, as she takes a job in the witch Yubaba's bathhouse to survive and undo the curse. Hayao Miyazaki wrote and directed the film for Studio Ghibli after designing it specifically for the young daughters of family friends, and it became the highest-grossing film in Japanese history at the time, winning the Golden Bear and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Suzume

Makoto Shinkai · 2022

Seventeen-year-old Suzume Iwato joins a young door-closer named Souta, who is turned into a three-legged chair partway through their journey, on a trip across Japan sealing doors that release a giant, earthquake-triggering worm. The third film in Makoto Shinkai's disaster trilogy, following Your Name and Weathering with You, draws directly on the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

Tangled

Byron Howard, Nathan Greno · 2010

Rapunzel escapes her tower with the help of a fleeing thief, and the film blends painterly computer animation with a straightforward fairy-tale plot. Directors Byron Howard and Nathan Greno's 2010 film, the most expensive animated feature made at the time, marked Disney's title change from Rapunzel to something less overtly a princess story.

The Adventures of Mark Twain

Will Vinton · 1985

Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Becky Thatcher stow away on an airship piloted by Mark Twain, who is travelling to keep what he believed was his destined appointment with the returning Halley's Comet, and along the way the children hear vignettes drawn from Twain's own stories, from a jumping frog to a vision of heaven. Vinton's stop-motion studio spent three and a half years and $1.5 million building the film in a converted Portland house, developing new computer-controlled camera and lighting systems along the way, only for a distributor to release the finished, distinctly adult-toned film as children's matinee programming.

The Aristocats

Wolfgang Reitherman · 1970

A wealthy Parisian widow's pampered cats are set to inherit her fortune, which prompts her butler to abandon them in the countryside, where a streetwise tomcat helps guide them home. The project began in 1962 as a proposed live-action television episode, was rejected, revived, and eventually turned into an animated feature at Disney's own suggestion — the last one he personally approved before he died in 1971. Phil Harris, cast as the tomcat O'Malley, was given room to improvise much of his own dialogue, shaping the character the way his earlier work on The Jungle Book had shaped Baloo.

The Book of Life

Jorge R. Gutiérrez · 2014

A bullfighter who would rather play guitar navigates a love triangle, his family's expectations and a wager between two gods of the afterlife. Jorge R. Gutierrez's 2014 directorial debut renders its Day of the Dead setting as carved wooden folk art brought to motion.

The Boy and the Heron

Hayao Miyazaki · 2023

After his mother dies in wartime Japan, Mahito Maki moves to the countryside, follows a talking grey heron into an abandoned tower, and enters a fantastical realm governed by its own private logic. Hayao Miyazaki spent roughly seven years making the film, released in Japan with no trailers, stills or synopsis beyond a single poster.

The Incredibles

Brad Bird · 2004

The Incredibles follows a superhero family forced into hiding by government mandate, focusing on a father stuck in a soul-crushing insurance job until a secret assignment pulls him back into hero work and endangers his family. Written and directed solely by Brad Bird for Pixar, with an all-human cast the studio had never animated before, the film grossed $631 million against a $92 million budget and won two competitive Academy Awards plus the first Hugo Award given to an entirely animated film.

The Iron Giant

Brad Bird · 1999

The Iron Giant drops a fifty-foot alien robot into small-town Maine in 1957 and lets a lonely boy's friendship with it, rather than its destructive potential, carry the film. Brad Bird's feature debut, made by Warner Bros. on roughly half the budget and schedule of comparable animated films, was a box-office failure on release but has since become a byword for a cult classic.

The Jungle Book

Wolfgang Reitherman · 1967

Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves in the Indian jungle, is walked toward the safety of a human village by the panther Bagheera and the bear Baloo while the tiger Shere Khan hunts him. Story artist Bill Peet developed an early, darker treatment closer to Rudyard Kipling's original stories before Walt Disney rejected it as unsuited to a family audience, replacing Peet with a new writing team who leaned into comedy and music instead. It became the last animated feature Disney oversaw personally before his death partway through production.

The Lego Movie

Christopher Miller, Phil Lord · 2014

An ordinary Lego minifigure is mistaken for the chosen one destined to stop a tyrant from gluing the universe into permanent order. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's 2014 film uses digital animation built to mimic stop motion and turns a marketing premise into a genuine argument about creativity.

The Lion King

Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff · 1994

The Lion King follows Simba, a lion cub exiled after his uncle Scar arranges his father Mufasa's death, as he grows up away from his kingdom and eventually returns to reclaim it. Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff directed after an earlier documentary-style version by George Scribner was abandoned for a musical treatment with songs by Elton John and Tim Rice and a score by Hans Zimmer. Made on a $45 million budget, it grossed $968.5 million, becoming the highest-grossing traditionally animated film ever made and winning the Academy Award for Best Original Score.

The Little Mermaid

John Musker, Ron Clements · 1989

John Musker and Ron Clements's 1989 adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale follows mermaid princess Ariel as she trades her voice to the sea witch Ursula for a chance at life on land and a human prince's love. Built around a Broadway-style score by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, it became Disney's biggest hit in years and is widely credited with launching the Disney Renaissance.

The Mitchells vs. The Machines

Mike Rianda, Jeff Rowe · 2021

Katie Mitchell, days from leaving for film school and still at odds with her earnest, technology-suspicious father, is stuck on a cross-country family road trip when a smartphone-assistant uprising begins rounding up humanity. Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe's Sony Pictures Animation feature, produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, pairs a hand-painted visual style adapted from Into the Spider-Verse's animation technology with a script built from Rianda's own family history and childhood fascination with robots.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Henry Selick · 1993

The Nightmare Before Christmas follows Jack Skellington, Halloween Town's bored king, as he discovers Christmas Town and decides, badly, that he can run the holiday himself. Henry Selick directed the stop-motion musical from a story and poem by Tim Burton, with songs and score by Danny Elfman, who also voices Jack's singing parts. Released under Disney's Touchstone label rather than the studio's own name, it grossed $75.1 million and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects, a first for an animated film.

The Polar Express

Robert Zemeckis · 2004

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.

The Red Turtle

Michaël Dudok de Wit · 2016

A shipwrecked man's repeated attempts to leave an uninhabited island are sabotaged by a giant red sea turtle, and his violent response to it sets in motion a transformation that reshapes his life on the island rather than ending it. Michaël Dudok de Wit's feature debut, made at Hayao Miyazaki's suggestion after he saw the director's short Father and Daughter, tells its entire story without a single word of dialogue across three generations on one stretch of sand.

The Secret of NIMH

Don Bluth · 1982

A widowed field mouse named Mrs. Brisby has to move her sick son before the farmer's plough destroys their home, and finds help among a colony of unusually intelligent rats who escaped a laboratory years earlier. Don Bluth directed the film as his debut after leaving Disney's animation department with several colleagues in 1979 to found an independent studio, taking on a book Disney had rejected twice before, adding mystical elements not present in the source novel, and finishing the whole project on a tighter budget and schedule than the studio he'd left would have allowed.

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

Isao Takahata · 2013

A girl born from a bamboo stalk is raised by a poor cutter who, on discovering gold nearby, drags her into a nobility she never wanted. Isao Takahata's 2013 adaptation of a tenth-century Japanese tale uses loose, watercolour-like animation to match its heroine's resistance to being made presentable.

The Triplets of Belleville

Sylvain Chomet · 2003

The Triplets of Belleville follows an elderly Frenchwoman who reshapes her life around her grandson's obsessive cycling career, then pursues him across an invented city, an amalgam of New York, Montreal and Quebec City, after gangsters kidnap him mid-Tour de France. Sylvain Chomet's first feature, told almost entirely through pantomime, sound and song, cost $8 million, took $14.8 million worldwide, and earned two Academy Award nominations, including the first for a PG-13 animated feature.

The Wild Robot

Chris Sanders · 2024

Shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, service robot Roz has to learn to survive among wildlife that first treats her as a monster, and ends up raising an orphaned gosling as her own. Chris Sanders adapted Peter Brown's 2016 novel with a hand-painted, watercolour visual style built to resemble Bambi filtered through Hayao Miyazaki.

The Wind Rises

Hayao Miyazaki · 2013

A fictionalised account of aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who dreamed of flight but could only design the machines rather than pilot them himself. Hayao Miyazaki's 2013 film pairs a delicate romance with the uncomfortable fact of what Horikoshi's designs became.

Toy Story

John Lasseter · 1995

Toy Story follows Woody, a cowboy doll who becomes territorial once space ranger toy Buzz Lightyear replaces him as a boy's favourite. John Lasseter directed the first entirely computer-animated feature and the first film produced by the newly founded Pixar, working from a script substantially rewritten after Disney rejected early story reels as too flat. Made on a $30 million budget under a deal that gave Disney full ownership of the characters, the film earned $373.6 million and became the first animated feature nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Toy Story 2

John Lasseter, Lee Unkrich, Ash Brannon · 1999

Toy Story 2 has Woody stolen by a toy collector who plans to sell him to a Tokyo museum, forcing Andy's other toys into a rescue mission while Woody weighs eternal preservation against a childhood that will end. Originally planned as a direct-to-video cash-in, it was rebuilt into a theatrical Pixar film on a compressed nine-month schedule, going on to gross $497 million against a $90 million budget and a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score.

Toy Story 3

Lee Unkrich · 2010

Andy leaves for college and his toys are accidentally donated to a daycare centre ruled by a resentful stuffed bear. Lee Unkrich's 2010 conclusion to the Toy Story trilogy pushes the franchise's premise, toys who fear abandonment, to its most literal extreme.

Toy Story 4

Josh Cooley, John Lasseter · 2019

Woody, no longer Bonnie's favourite toy, follows a homemade spork named Forky on a road trip and is reunited with the long-lost Bo Peep, who has built an independent life as a lost toy rather than an owned one. Josh Cooley, who replaced original director John Lasseter partway through a lengthy development process, uses that reunion to reopen a question Toy Story 3 seemed to have already settled: what a toy is actually for once being loved by a child stops being guaranteed.

Up

Pete Docter, Bob Peterson · 2009

A widower ties thousands of balloons to his house and flies to South America to fulfil a promise made decades earlier, only to find an uninvited child stowaway waiting on his porch. Pete Docter's 2009 film pairs one of animation's most quoted opening sequences with an adventure plot that keeps circling back to grief.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Nick Park, Steve Box · 2005

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit expands the stop-motion duo into a monster-movie parody, following the pair's pest-control business as a mysterious Were-Rabbit starts terrorizing a town's giant-vegetable competition. Directed by Nick Park and Steve Box for Aardman and DreamWorks Animation on a $30 million budget, it grossed $194 million and became the first stop-motion film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Nick Park, Merlin Crossingham · 2024

Vengeance Most Fowl brings back Feathers McGraw, the silent penguin villain from The Wrong Trousers, who hijacks Wallace's new robotic garden gnome to rebuild his criminal operation and settle an old score. Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham direct from Mark Burton's screenplay, with Ben Whitehead voicing Wallace in his first feature appearance following Peter Sallis's death. Made by Aardman Animations, the film holds a 100% Tomatometer score, won the inaugural BAFTA for Best Children's and Family Film, and became the BBC's most-watched scripted broadcast since 2002 after its Christmas Day airing.

Watership Down

Martin Rosen, John Hubley · 1978

A small group of rabbits flees their doomed warren on a premonition of disaster and treks across the English countryside to found a new one, clashing along the way with the totalitarian warren of Efrafa under General Woundwort. Martin Rosen took over direction from John Hubley partway through production, financed the film through a British consortium, and released it in 1978 to an audience unsure what age it was made for.

Weathering with You

Makoto Shinkai · 2019

Hodaka, a runaway sixteen-year-old scraping by in Tokyo, teams up with Hina, an orphaned girl who can part the rain with a prayer, to sell her ability as a paid service during an unusually long, disaster-scale downpour. Shinkai's follow-up to Your Name, again scored by Radwimps, pushes his interest in weather and disaster further than its predecessor by making the couple's happiness and the city's survival mutually exclusive, and then letting a teenager choose.

Wolfwalkers

Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart · 2020

Robyn, an English hunter's daughter in occupied Ireland, is sent to help exterminate the last wolf pack outside Kilkenny and instead befriends Mebh, a girl from a wolf-linked tribe whose spirit runs as a wolf by night, discovering along the way that a bite has made her one of them too. Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart's Cartoon Saloon feature, the third in Moore's Irish folklore trilogy, builds its visual design and its politics from the same conflict, an authoritarian Lord Protector's rule against nature versus everything the forest represents.

Yellow Submarine

George Dunning · 1968

The Beatles' animated counterparts, voiced by actors rather than the band themselves, sail to Pepperland to save it from the music-hating Blue Meanies, with the story mostly serving as connective tissue between sequences built around individual songs. George Dunning directed, with art director Heinz Edelmann's psychedelic pop-art style giving the film a visual identity that outlived its plot.

Your Name

Makoto Shinkai · 2016

A Tokyo boy and a rural girl who have never met begin waking up in each other's bodies, building a friendship across the swap before a hidden twist reveals the stakes are far higher than a shared inconvenience. Makoto Shinkai wrote, directed, shot and edited the film after visiting a village destroyed by the 2011 tsunami, and Your Name became the first entry in what critics now call his disaster trilogy, and briefly the highest-grossing Japanese film ever made.

Zootopia

Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush · 2016

Judy Hopps, the first rabbit on the Zootopia police force, partners against her will with Nick Wilde, a fox con artist, to solve a missing-mammal case that exposes prejudice baked into the city's design. Byron Howard and Rich Moore's Disney feature restructures a buddy-cop plot around predator-prey tension, using new fur-simulation software and years of zoo research to render a mammal metropolis that looks, and argues, like it was built for its inhabitants rather than around them.