Best 2000s animated movies

Spirited Away▲ Rising

Chihiro's terrified stumble through a bathhouse of gods and spirits became Miyazaki's masterpiece, a film so singular it beat Titanic at the Japanese box office and became the first hand-drawn, non-English film to win the Animation Oscar. No-Face, the soot sprites, the train ride over endless water—every frame argues that animation can be as strange and profound as any myth, which is why this tops nearly every serious list of the decade.

Release Year: 2001Studio: Studio GhibliBox Office: $395,000,000Rotten Tomatoes Score: 9.7/10IMDb Rating: 8.6/10Won Best Animated Feature Oscar: ✓Runtime (minutes): 125 minExtended Dialogue-Free Sequence: —

added by IJRin 5 rankings

WALL-E▲ Rising

Pixar spent the first thirty-plus minutes with almost no dialogue, just a lonely trash-compacting robot falling for a sleek probe named EVE, and somehow made it the most romantic blockbuster of the decade. It smuggled a sharp critique of consumerism and human complacency into a kids' movie without ever losing its tenderness, proving Pixar could do silent-film-level visual storytelling in a CGI landscape. Its earns its spot as the boldest swing of the era that actually connected.

Release Year: 2008Studio: PixarBox Office: $521,000,000Rotten Tomatoes Score: 9.5/10IMDb Rating: 8.4/10Won Best Animated Feature Oscar: ✓Runtime (minutes): 98 minExtended Dialogue-Free Sequence: ✓

added by IJRin 9 rankings

Up▼ Falling

Those first ten wordless minutes chronicling Carl and Ellie's entire marriage, ending with her death and his balloon-house grief, wrecked audiences before the plot even started and remain the gold standard for animated emotional economy. What follows—a floating house, a talking dog obsessed with squirrels, a forgotten explorer villain—never loses that ache underneath the whimsy. It's the film that proved a movie for kids could open with a silent eulogy and still be beloved by everyone.

Release Year: 2009Studio: PixarBox Office: $735,000,000Rotten Tomatoes Score: 9.8/10IMDb Rating: 8.3/10Won Best Animated Feature Oscar: ✓Runtime (minutes): 96 minExtended Dialogue-Free Sequence: ✓

added by IJRin 7 rankings

Finding Nemo▼ Falling

A clownfish father crossing an entire ocean to find his son turned into Pixar's biggest hit of the era, driven by Ellen DeGeneres's Dory turning short-term memory loss into pure comic gold and 'just keep swimming' into a cultural mantra. The film's underwater world—jellyfish forests, sharks in recovery, a pelican named Nigel—was a technical leap that made water itself a character. It belongs here as the movie that made ocean anxiety and parental love equally universal.

Release Year: 2003Studio: PixarBox Office: $940,000,000Rotten Tomatoes Score: 9.9/10IMDb Rating: 8.2/10Won Best Animated Feature Oscar: ✓Runtime (minutes): 100 minExtended Dialogue-Free Sequence: —

added by IJRin 7 rankings