Best Of
30 Best Animated Movies — Not Just for Kids
Spirited Away, WALL-E, Spider-Verse, Princess Mononoke — the 30 best animated movies ever made, from Pixar to Ghibli to stop-motion.
30 FILMS·April 2026·By MoviesPack
"Animated" doesn't mean "for children." The best animated films deal with death, grief, identity, war, environmentalism, and the passage of time with more honesty and craft than most live-action dramas. The visual medium gives filmmakers freedom to go places that would be impossible or absurd otherwise — and the best directors have used that freedom extraordinarily well.
These 30 films are the cream. Watch them regardless of your age.
Section 1
The 30 Best Animated Movies Ever Made
01
**Spirited Away** (2001) ★ 8.6
A ten-year-old girl's parents are turned into pigs at a mysterious roadside restaurant, and she has to find a job in a spirit bathhouse just to survive long enough to save them. The world she navigates — gods, spirits, river dragons, a boy with a secret — is so densely imagined that you notice entirely different things watching it at 8, at 18, and at 38. Miyazaki built a film that grows with you, which is rare in any medium. 👉 Where to watch Spirited Away
02
**Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse** (2018) ★ 8.4
Miles Morales is just a kid from Brooklyn trying to figure out his place in the world when he gets bitten by a radioactive spider — and then five other Spider-People from alternate universes land on his doorstep. His arc is the best superhero origin in any medium: a teenager who has to earn the suit rather than simply receive it. Every frame is hand-painted at comic-book resolution, a visual revolution that makes other animated films look conventional by comparison.
03
**WALL-E** (2008) ★ 8.4
A small trash-compacting robot has been alone on a dead Earth for 700 years, collecting interesting objects and watching Hello, Dolly! on a loop. Then a sleek white probe arrives, and WALL-E does the only thing he knows how to do — he tries to show her something wonderful. The first half of the film is nearly wordless and somehow the most emotionally precise thing Pixar has ever made.
04
**Princess Mononoke** (1997) ★ 8.4
A young prince cursed by a dying demon god travels west to find its source, and arrives in the middle of a war between an iron-smelting town and the ancient forest trying to destroy it. Neither side is wrong. A human woman built Iron Town to give outcasts a home. A wolf god raised a human girl to protect the forest. Miyazaki refuses to resolve this cleanly — the film ends in damage and compromise, which is the most honest ending possible.
05
**Up** (2009) ★ 8.2
A grumpy old man attaches ten thousand balloons to his house and flies it to South America to keep a promise he made to his late wife — with an 8-year-old Wilderness Explorer accidentally along for the ride. The adventure that follows is rousing and funny, but the first eight minutes, which compress an entire marriage and a lifetime of grief into a wordless montage, are among the most powerful pieces of filmmaking in cinema history.
06
**Grave of the Fireflies** (1988) ★ 8.5
A teenage boy and his four-year-old sister try to survive the final months of WWII in Japan after their mother is killed in a firebombing. They move into an abandoned shelter by a pond, catch fireflies in a tin, and make do with almost nothing. The film does not look away from what happens next. Roger Ebert called it one of the greatest war films ever made, and he was right — it is devastating and absolutely essential, but not the one for a light evening.
07
**Toy Story** (1995) ★ 8.3
Woody is the favorite toy — until a flashier space ranger named Buzz Lightyear arrives and takes his place. What starts as jealousy becomes something bigger: two toys who hate each other having to cooperate just to get home. The existential question running underneath — what happens when you're no longer needed? — hits harder the older you get, which is why this still works completely thirty years later.
08
**Your Name** (2016) ★ 8.4
A boy in Tokyo and a girl in a small mountain town keep waking up in each other's bodies, leaving each other notes, adjusting to each other's lives. Then something goes wrong with the swap and neither of them knows why. What begins as a charming body-swap comedy turns into a race against time with a genuine emotional payoff — the most successful Japanese animated film ever made, and it earns every yen.
09
**Akira** (1988) ★ 8.0
A biker gang leader in post-apocalyptic Neo-Tokyo tries to save his friend Tetsuo after a government experiment unlocks terrifying psychic powers inside him — powers that once destroyed the original Tokyo. The film is a cyberpunk epic about the state, the individual, and what happens when a human body becomes a weapon it can't control. Its influence on visual culture is incalculable, and it still looks and sounds like nothing else.
10
**Toy Story 3** (2010) ★ 8.3
Andy is leaving for college and the toys end up donated to a daycare that turns out to be a prison run by a corrupted bear who smells of strawberries. A jailbreak follows — and then a furnace, and then an ending that makes grown adults cry in theaters. The rare sequel that surpasses the original by understanding that the toys' story was always about letting go.
11
**Finding Nemo** (2003) ★ 8.2
An overprotective clownfish crosses the entire Pacific Ocean to rescue his son from a dentist's aquarium in Sydney — accompanied by a blue tang with no short-term memory. The film works as a comedy road movie and as a story about a father learning when to hold on and when to let go. Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres have perfect chemistry, and the underwater world still looks gorgeous.
12
**Coco** (2017) ★ 8.4
Miguel wants to be a musician more than anything, but his family banned music generations ago after a great-great-grandfather abandoned them for a career on stage. On Día de los Muertos, he accidentally ends up in the Land of the Dead, searching for the ancestor who can grant his wish — and uncovering a family mystery nobody intended to bury. The final scene, with "Remember Me," is a genuine weapon. Bring tissues.
13
**Inside Out** (2015) ★ 8.2
An 11-year-old girl moves from Minnesota to San Francisco and struggles to adjust, while inside her head the emotions running her life — Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Disgust — fall into chaos. Joy spends the whole film trying to prevent Sadness from touching anything important, and the film's central revelation is that she's wrong to. One of the most honest films ever made about what it actually feels like to grow up and lose something you can't name.
14
**Ratatouille** (2007) ★ 8.1
A rat in Paris has an extraordinary sense of taste and smell and the desperate, impractical dream of cooking in a great restaurant. He ends up guiding a bumbling kitchen worker from the top of his head, hidden under a chef's hat. The moment when the famous, withering food critic takes one bite and is transported back to his mother's kitchen in the countryside — Pixar at its most quietly devastating.
15
**The Lion King** (1994) ★ 8.5
A lion cub watches his father die, is made to believe it was his fault, and spends his life running from that guilt until a vision in the stars forces him back home. It's Hamlet in the Serengeti, and it works completely — the tragedy is real, the stakes are real, and the ghost-father scene is the most operatic thing Disney ever put on screen. Hans Zimmer's score and Elton John's songs have been lodged in the cultural memory for thirty years for good reason.
16
**Persepolis** (2007) ★ 8.0
A girl grows up in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution, watching her country transform around her, then gets sent to Europe as a teenager and discovers the loneliness of exile. Marjane Satrapi adapted her own graphic memoir — it's funny, furious, and deeply personal in ways that animated films rarely allow themselves to be. The black-and-white animation isn't a style choice; it's the way the story insists on being told.
17
**Waltz with Bashir** (2008) ★ 7.9
An Israeli filmmaker can't remember anything about his time in the 1982 Lebanon War, so he tracks down old soldiers and pieces together what happened at the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The film is a documentary, but the trauma and fragmented memory demanded animation — and the result is genuinely haunting. The final sequence shifts without warning from animation to real archive footage, a gut-punch that forces you to reassemble everything you just watched.
18
**Fantastic Mr. Fox** (2009) ★ 7.9
Mr. Fox promised his wife he'd stop stealing chickens — and then he can't help himself and steals from three farmers at once, triggering an escalating war that threatens to destroy every animal in the valley. Every frame of Wes Anderson's stop-motion adaptation is composed like a dollhouse painting. George Clooney makes the title character simultaneously insufferable and utterly lovable. Anarchic, sweet, and endlessly quotable.
19
**Kubo and the Two Strings** (2016) ★ 7.7
A one-eyed boy in ancient Japan plays a shamisen that brings origami figures to life, and he's been hiding from his grandfather — a Moon King who wants to take his remaining eye. When his mother's spell breaks and the spirit world comes for him, he has to find the pieces of a legendary suit of armor using only his music and two unlikely companions. The emotional core is about memory and storytelling, and it earns its final act completely.
20
**The Incredibles** (2004) ★ 8.0
Superheroes have been banned and Bob Parr is in witness protection, selling insurance and slowly dying of ordinariness. Then a secret mission offers him a way back — and nearly destroys his family in the process. The film works simultaneously as a superhero movie, a midlife crisis story, and a pointed argument about what happens to a society that insists everyone pretend to be equal. The sequel doesn't come close.
21
**Howl's Moving Castle** (2004) ★ 8.2
A shy young hat-maker is cursed by a witch into an old woman's body and finds shelter in a walking, clanking castle inhabited by a flamboyant wizard named Howl who is slowly giving his heart away to the war. The film is about transformation — of bodies, of hearts, of a country — and refuses to let any of its characters remain who they started as. The castle itself is cinema's greatest vehicle: living, impossible, and strangely warm.
22
**Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs** (1937) ★ 7.7
A princess flees a queen who wants her dead for being prettier, finds shelter with seven miners in a forest cottage, and waits — until the queen, disguised as an old woman, finds her anyway. This is where feature animation began, nearly 90 years ago, and the craft is precise enough that it still holds. The evil queen is genuinely frightening in a way Disney's later villains rarely match.
23
**Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind** (1984) ★ 8.1
A thousand years after an industrial collapse, the Earth is being swallowed by a toxic jungle filled with giant mutant insects — and a young princess from a small valley is the only one trying to understand the insects rather than destroy them. This is the template for everything Miyazaki built afterward: an environmentalist epic with a female protagonist who leads through empathy rather than force, and no clean villains.
24
**My Neighbor Totoro** (1988) ★ 8.2
Two sisters move to a farmhouse in rural Japan to be closer to the hospital where their mother is recovering from illness. The older sister holds herself together; the younger one explores the forest and discovers enormous, sleeping spirits who don't seem to mean any harm. There's almost no plot, just the texture of childhood and the gentle presence of something magical just at the edge of what the adults can see. The most re-watchable thing in the Ghibli catalog.
25
**Encanto** (2021) ★ 7.3
Every child in the Madrigal family receives a magical gift — except Mirabel, who got nothing, and who the rest of the family quietly treats as a reminder of something that went wrong. When the magical house starts cracking and the gifts start failing, she's the only one who thinks to ask why. Lin-Manuel Miranda's songs are clever and catchy, but the film's real strength is in Mirabel: a Disney heroine who has to find her worth without a superpower to lean on.
26
**Bambi** (1942) ★ 7.3
A fawn grows up in the forest, learns the world, makes friends — and then one winter morning, shots ring out. Disney went dark with the death of Bambi's mother decades before Pixar made emotional devastation fashionable. The film is still remarkably beautiful, and the scene that traumatized generations of children has lost none of its force.
27
**Princess and the Frog** (2009) ★ 7.1
Tiana is working two jobs and saving every penny to open the restaurant her late father always dreamed of, when she accidentally kisses a prince who's been turned into a frog — and becomes one herself. The New Orleans jazz, the bayou adventure, and the voodoo villain are all wonderful, but the real pleasure is Tiana: a Disney heroine defined by work ethic rather than wishes, which is genuinely refreshing.
28
**Moana** (2016) ★ 7.6
A Polynesian chief's daughter feels a pull toward the ocean that her father keeps trying to redirect toward the shore, and eventually she steals a boat, recruits a shape-shifting demigod who's lost his magic fishhook, and sails across the open sea to restore the heart of the island goddess. The Polynesian culture is treated with genuine care, and Maui — voiced by Dwayne Johnson — is one of Disney's best male characters in years: vain, funny, and ultimately generous.
29
**Coraline** (2009) ★ 7.5
A girl moves to a new house where her parents are too busy for her, discovers a hidden door in the wall, and steps through it into a parallel version of her life where everything is better — the food is delicious, the garden is magical, and her "Other Mother" pays her constant attention. The catch is the buttons where her eyes should be. Genuinely disturbing in ways that linger, and the ideal gateway horror film for younger audiences ready to be properly scared. 👉 Movies like Coraline
30
**The Tale of Princess Kaguya** (2013) ★ 8.1
A bamboo cutter finds a tiny girl inside a glowing stalk and raises her as his daughter, convinced she is a princess from the moon meant for a great life. As she grows, she discovers what that "great life" costs — the freedom she had in the countryside, the people she loved, and eventually everything. Isao Takahata's final film is deliberately rough-edged, all charcoal and watercolor wash, like watching a living ink drawing — and it carries an immense, quiet melancholy about what it means to want things and have to let them go.
Section 2
Animated Movies by Studio
| Studio | Best Film | Other Essentials | |--------|-----------|------------------| | Studio Ghibli | Spirited Away | Princess Mononoke, Grave of the Fireflies | | Pixar | WALL-E | Up, Coco, Toy Story | | Disney | The Lion King | Moana, Encanto | | Sony | Spider-Verse | — | | Laika | Kubo | Coraline | | Other | Akira, Waltz with Bashir | Persepolis, Your Name |
Section 3
Want More?
- [Best Sci-Fi Movies](/best/sci-fi) — many share animated films' sense of wonder - [Movies like Coraline](/similar/coraline) — dark, inventive, visually distinctive - [Best Movies for Families](/mood/feel-good) — if you want to pick something for movie night - [Where to watch Studio Ghibli films](/where-to-watch/spirited-away)
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