Best Animated Movies Ever

Best Animated Movies Ever — Yourlist

Animation has evolved from simple hand-drawn shorts into a powerhouse art form capable of rivaling any live-action epic in storytelling, emotion, and visual wonder. From beloved classics that defined childhoods to groundbreaking modern masterpieces, the debate over which animated film reigns supreme is as passionate as it gets. Now it's your turn to weigh in — cast your vote and help crown the greatest animated movie of all time.

What counts: Best is judged by critical acclaim, cultural influence, box office success, and audience love; ratings and figures are approximate and sourced from general public consensus.

Spirited Away
Miyazaki's masterpiece opens with a girl's parents turned into pigs and only escalates from there, building a bathhouse universe so densely imagined it became the first anime to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar. No-Face silently devouring workers, Chihiro's name literally stolen from her—this is animation as pure dream logic, and it remade what Western audiences believed hand-drawn film could do.};
Release Year: 2001Studio: Critic Score: 9.7/10Audience Score: 9.5/10Worldwide Box Office: $395,000,000Cultural Impact: 9.5/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
added by IJRin 5 rankings Spirited Away
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The film that invented an entire industry: Pixar's 1995 debut proved computers could tell a heartfelt story, not just render shiny surfaces, and Woody's jealous meltdown over Buzz Lightyear became the template for every buddy comedy that followed. "To infinity and beyond" isn't just a catchphrase, it's the sound of animation crossing into a new century.
Release Year: 1995Studio: Critic Score: 9.5/10Audience Score: 9.5/10Worldwide Box Office: $373,000,000Cultural Impact: 10/10Won an Academy Award: —
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The stampede that kills Mufasa remains one of the most traumatizing four minutes in children's cinema, and it's exactly why Simba's journey back to Pride Rock hits so hard. A billion-dollar box office phenomenon and Broadway juggernaut, it's Shakespeare with lions and Elton John songs, and audiences have never stopped roaring 'Hakuna Matata' back at their screens.
Release Year: 1994Studio: Critic Score: 9.3/10Audience Score: 9.6/10Worldwide Box Office: $968,000,000Cultural Impact: 9.8/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
This film didn't just reinvent Spider-Man, it reinvented what animation was allowed to look like—comic-book halftone dots, chromatic aberration, and variable frame rates colliding into something no studio had dared before. Miles Morales leaping off that building to Post Malone's score is the moment modern animation grew up, and the instant Oscar win confirmed everyone felt it too.
Release Year: 2018Studio: Critic Score: 9.7/10Audience Score: 9.6/10Worldwide Box Office: $384,000,000Cultural Impact: 9/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
added by IJRin 5 rankings Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
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Pixar had the audacity to open a kids' movie with a wordless montage that chronicles an entire marriage, love, and loss in under five minutes, leaving grown adults sobbing before the balloons even lift the house. Carl and Russell's odd-couple friendship carries real emotional weight after that gut-punch, proving animation could handle grief as gracefully as any live-action drama.
Release Year: 2009Studio: Critic Score: 9.3/10Audience Score: 9.3/10Worldwide Box Office: $735,000,000Cultural Impact: 8.5/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
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WALL-E
A nearly dialogue-free first act follows a lonely trash-compacting robot in love with a plant, and somehow it's more romantic than most live-action films—EVE and WALL-E's space-dance is silent-era Chaplin by way of science fiction. It's Pixar's boldest artistic swing, smuggling a sharp critique of consumerism and climate apathy inside a story so tender you forget you're being lectured.
Release Year: 2008Studio: Critic Score: 9.5/10Audience Score: 9.2/10Worldwide Box Office: $521,000,000Cultural Impact: 8.7/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
added by IJRin 9 rankings WALL-E
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"Just keep swimming" became a cultural mantra, but the real genius is how a father's anxious ocean-wide search for his son turns fish-tank claustrophobia into an epic adventure. Dory's memory loss gags shouldn't work as comedy and tragedy simultaneously, yet they do, making this the rare film that's both Pixar's biggest tearjerker and its funniest hangout movie.
Release Year: 2003Studio: Critic Score: 9.2/10Audience Score: 9.3/10Worldwide Box Office: $940,000,000Cultural Impact: 8.8/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
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An ogre, a wisecracking donkey, and a fairy tale princess who breaks into martial arts—Shrek weaponized irreverence against Disney's own playbook, layering pop songs and pop-culture jabs into a genre that had gone stale. "Ogres are like onions" reset animated comedy's voice for two decades and made DreamWorks a legitimate rival overnight.
Release Year: 2001Studio: Critic Score: 8.8/10Audience Score: 8.9/10Worldwide Box Office: $484,000,000Cultural Impact: 9/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
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Few animated films risk building their emotional climax around a grandmother's forgotten memory of her father, but Coco does it, and 'Remember Me' sung softly to a dying old woman is a devastating masterstroke. Its vivid, marigold-lit vision of the Land of the Dead didn't just honor Día de los Muertos, it became one of the most culturally significant American animated films about family and legacy ever made.
Release Year: 2017Studio: Critic Score: 9.5/10Audience Score: 9.5/10Worldwide Box Office: $807,000,000Cultural Impact: 8.5/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
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Pixar turned the inside of an 11-year-old's brain into a buddy comedy starring five emotions, and then had the nerve to argue that Sadness, not Joy, is what makes us human—a thesis delivered through Bing Bong's tearful sacrifice that wrecks audiences of every age. It's the studio's most conceptually audacious film, turning abstract psychology into something as vivid and moving as any adventure story.
Release Year: 2015Studio: Critic Score: 9.4/10Audience Score: 9.3/10Worldwide Box Office: $858,000,000Cultural Impact: 8.7/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
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Toothless's ear-flick of trust toward Hiccup, set against John Powell's soaring score, is the moment this film transcended 'kids movie about a boy and his dragon' into genuine emotional cinema. DreamWorks proved it could match Pixar's sincerity beat for beat, and the film's climactic flight sequence remains one of the most purely thrilling pieces of animation ever made.
Release Year: 2010Studio: Critic Score: 9.1/10Audience Score: 9.2/10Worldwide Box Office: $495,000,000Cultural Impact: 8/10Won an Academy Award: —
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The first animated film ever nominated for Best Picture, it earned that honor with a ballroom waltz so lush it redefined what Disney's Renaissance era could achieve visually and emotionally. Belle's insistence on being more than a 'provincial' girl made her the studio's first truly modern heroine, and the title song alone justifies its place among the greats.
Release Year: 1991Studio: Critic Score: 9.3/10Audience Score: 9.2/10Worldwide Box Office: $425,000,000Cultural Impact: 9.2/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
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Pixar reinvented the superhero genre years before the MCU took over, wrapping a story about suburban ennui and midlife crisis inside gorgeous action set pieces—Mr. Incredible's secret gym-locker nostalgia for glory days speaks to every adult in the audience. Edna Mode alone, with her 'no capes' rule, delivers more personality than most entire animated casts.
Release Year: 2004Studio: Critic Score: 9.4/10Audience Score: 9.3/10Worldwide Box Office: $633,000,000Cultural Impact: 9/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
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The premise sounds absurd on paper—a rat who dreams of cooking in a five-star Paris kitchen—yet the film earns every bit of its ambition, climaxing in a bite of ratatouille that transports a cynical food critic straight back to his childhood. Anton Ego's review, praising anyone who dares to create, doubles as Pixar's own mission statement, and it's one of the most beautifully animated food films ever made.
Release Year: 2007Studio: Critic Score: 9.3/10Audience Score: 9.1/10Worldwide Box Office: $623,000,000Cultural Impact: 8.3/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
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'Let It Go' didn't just become a song, it became a cultural event, blaring from every household with kids and redefining the Disney princess narrative around sisterly love instead of romantic rescue. Elsa's ice palace sequence is a visual triumph of modern CG animation, and the film's billion-dollar success reshaped an entire decade of Disney's creative direction.
Release Year: 2013Studio: Critic Score: 9/10Audience Score: 9/10Worldwide Box Office: $1,280,000,000Cultural Impact: 9.3/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
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Tetsuo's body horrifically mutating into an unstoppable mass of flesh and machinery in neon-drenched Neo-Tokyo shocked Western audiences into realizing animation could be R-rated, philosophical, and terrifying all at once. Its hand-drawn biker chase alone influenced decades of sci-fi filmmaking, cementing Akira as the film that opened the door for anime's global explosion.
Release Year: 1988Studio: Critic Score: 9/10Audience Score: 8.8/10Worldwide Box Office: —Cultural Impact: 9/10Won an Academy Award: —
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Princess Mononoke
Miyazaki refused easy villains here, giving us a war between forest gods and industrial humanity where both sides have legitimate grievances, embodied by San's blood-smeared face as she defends the wolf god Moro. It's the darkest, most morally complex entry in his filmography, and its ecological rage feels more urgent with every passing year.
Release Year: 1997Studio: Critic Score: 9.2/10Audience Score: 9.1/10Worldwide Box Office: $169,000,000Cultural Impact: 9/10Won an Academy Award: —
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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Walt Disney bet his studio on the idea that audiences would sit through a full-length cartoon, and the poisoned apple scene alone proved animation could carry genuine dread and beauty in equal measure. As the first American animated feature, it didn't just launch a studio—it invented the entire medium as commercial cinema.
Release Year: 1937Studio: Critic Score: 9.3/10Audience Score: 8.9/10Worldwide Box Office: $418,000,000Cultural Impact: 10/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
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Monstro the whale swallowing Geppetto's ship, Pleasure Island's boys transforming into braying donkeys—Pinocchio is far darker and more frightening than its 'Wish Upon a Star' reputation suggests, and that's exactly why it endures. Its technical achievement, from the multiplane camera work to fluid character animation, remains a benchmark few films since have matched.
Release Year: 1940Studio: Critic Score: 9.1/10Audience Score: 8.5/10Worldwide Box Office: $164,000,000Cultural Impact: 8.5/10Won an Academy Award: ✓
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The Nightmare Before Christmas
Jack Skellington's identity crisis between Halloween Town and Christmas is stop-motion storytelling at its most stylistically singular, with Danny Elfman's songs turning existential ennui into something you can hum. It carved out an entire aesthetic—gothic, whimsical, endlessly merchandисable—that still defines alternative pop culture decades after release.
Release Year: 1993Studio: Critic Score: 9/10Audience Score: 9/10Worldwide Box Office: $100,000,000Cultural Impact: 8.8/10Won an Academy Award: —
added by IJRin 3 rankings The Nightmare Before Christmas
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