There is no objective answer to “What are the greatest animated movies of the last 40 years?” This ranked selection treats greatness as a blend of visual invention, storytelling, emotional force, craft, influence, and rewatchability—not box-office totals or awards alone. It covers feature films first released from October 7, 1986, through October 7, 2026, using the original release date rather than a later release in a particular territory. Mixed-media films qualify when animation is central to the feature.
The list ranges across hand-drawn, computer-generated, and stop-motion filmmaking, including work from Japan, the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Its order is an editorial judgment, not a claim to a definitive canon: established guides use different scopes and methods, and even Rotten Tomatoes’ 2010s ranking required at least 80 reviews while ranking by Tomatometer. (Rotten Tomatoes’ essential animated movies guide; Rotten Tomatoes’ 2010s guide; Time Out’s animated-film guide)
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10. Chicken Run (2000)
Nick Park and Peter Lord’s stop-motion escape comedy turns a chicken farm into a miniature prison-break film. Its handmade world is not merely a novelty: expressive clay figures, physical sets, and sharply timed gags make the chickens’ confinement tangible while keeping the adventure buoyant. Ginger’s repeated attempts to organize an escape give the story a clear engine, and the ensemble’s contrasting personalities make their eventual cooperation satisfying.
Its place here recognizes how confidently it adapts the suspense and teamwork of a classic caper to a very different cast and medium. The danger is real enough to give the escape stakes, but the film never loses its comic rhythm.
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9. Toy Story (1995)
Pixar’s first feature-length computer-animated film makes a simple rivalry—Woody’s fear of being replaced by Buzz Lightyear—into a durable story about insecurity, friendship, and change. The computer animation was a landmark in feature filmmaking, but the film’s staying power depends just as much on its compact structure and recognizably human emotional problem.
Its digital imagery belongs to its moment, yet the characters remain readable and the conflict remains relatable. Toy Story earns its place not just for helping establish a new production approach, but for making that approach serve a story that works on its own terms.
8. The Iron Giant (1999)
Brad Bird’s hand-drawn science-fiction story pairs Cold War anxiety with an intimate friendship between a boy and a giant machine. Hogarth’s curiosity and the Giant’s gentle uncertainty give the film its emotional center; the government’s fear of the unfamiliar supplies the pressure around them. The contrast makes the Giant’s final choice powerful without reducing the story to spectacle.
The film’s animation gives the enormous robot weight while preserving his vulnerability, and its small-town setting keeps the larger themes grounded. It is a precise, affecting example of how a family film can take fear and violence seriously without surrendering tenderness.
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7. Persepolis (2007)
Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud adapt Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel into stark black-and-white animation. The restricted palette and graphic shapes retain the source’s visual directness while giving the film a language of its own. Through Marjane’s childhood and adolescence amid revolution, repression, and life abroad, political history remains tied to the particular experience of one person growing up.
That balance is the film’s achievement: it neither treats history as background decoration nor lets the scale of events erase the individual voice. Persepolis demonstrates that animation can carry memoir and political testimony with clarity and emotional complexity.
6. WALL-E (2008)
Andrew Stanton’s science-fiction romance opens with a sustained stretch of nearly wordless storytelling. WALL-E, a lonely waste-collecting robot, moves through a ruined Earth with a curiosity that makes even small discoveries feel consequential. The film’s visual storytelling and sound design establish his character before the plot expands into a satire of human dependence and environmental neglect.
The shift from solitary exploration to a larger adventure is a risk, but it gives the film room to connect a tender romance to its broader concerns. WALL-E is at its best when its images do the work of explanation: a discarded object, an empty landscape, or a small gesture can carry more than dialogue would.
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Hayao Miyazaki’s fantasy follows Chihiro into a spirit world where she must work, adapt, and hold on to her identity after her parents are transformed. Its many strange inhabitants and shifting rules create the feeling of a world larger than the plot; the story’s emotional line remains Chihiro’s gradual growth from frightened child to capable, observant protagonist.
The film’s artistry and reach are both well documented, but recognition is context rather than a ranking formula. TIME reports that Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards in 2003 and discusses its Japanese box-office history and international distribution. (TIME on Spirited Away) Its award marks a significant milestone; it does not, by itself, settle which film is best.
4. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013)
Isao Takahata’s Studio Ghibli film reworks a Japanese folktale in a visual style that looks drawn in the moment: loose, urgent lines and open, unfinished spaces give scenes a striking sense of movement. A bamboo cutter discovers a tiny girl who grows rapidly into a young woman, and the story’s wonder gradually gives way to the demands others place on her.
The apparent simplicity of the drawings makes the film’s emotional turns more, not less, forceful. Its approach is distinct from polished realism or computer-generated spectacle: the line itself can seem to carry Kaguya’s joy, anger, and desire to escape.
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3. Wolfwalkers (2020)
Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart’s Irish animated feature follows Robyn, a young hunter’s daughter, as she befriends Mebh, a girl connected to a community of wolves. The film sets its controlled, geometric town against a forest that seems to burst beyond its borders. That contrast makes the conflict visible: the authorities’ effort to tame the landscape also threatens the people and creatures who belong to it.
Its hand-drawn design is not simply decorative. Different visual rules give the film’s competing worlds personality, while Robyn’s changing loyalties turn a broad conflict over control and freedom into a friendship with real stakes.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.2. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)
This stop-motion retelling moves the Pinocchio story into Fascist Italy and makes its wooden boy’s disobedience a challenge to a culture demanding obedience. The painstaking physical craft gives the characters and settings a tangible presence, but the film’s strongest choice is thematic: it treats imperfect, unruly life as something worth protecting.
Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson’s version is darker than many familiar adaptations, yet its emotional center is a parent and child learning how to love one another without trying to make one another flawless. Stop motion and story work in concert: the visible material world reinforces the film’s interest in mortality, change, and what it means to be alive.
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1. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman’s film puts Miles Morales at the center of a superhero story about identity, inheritance, and finding a way forward on his own terms. Its visual language draws on comic-book marks, varied rendering styles, and restless motion; the result feels designed for animation rather than like live-action cinema imitated by computers.
The multiverse brings together different versions of Spider-Man, but the spectacle keeps returning to Miles: his uncertainty, his relationships, and the moment he chooses to act. That combination of formal invention and accessible character storytelling makes it the strongest overall choice on this list. It shows how a familiar franchise can become a vehicle for a genuinely fresh animated form.
How this ranking defines “greatest”
There is no single accepted method for ranking animated features. Rotten Tomatoes’ essential guide says a Tomatometer score was required but was not otherwise a ranking factor; its 2010s ranking used a different rule, requiring at least 80 reviews and ordering films by score. Time Out’s updated 2026 guide offers another ranked selection. Those differences are a reason to make the judgment criteria visible rather than present one list as settled fact. (Rotten Tomatoes’ essential animated movies guide; Rotten Tomatoes’ 2010s guide; Time Out’s animated-film guide)
- Visual invention and craft: how the film uses its medium, whether hand-drawn, computer-generated, stop-motion, or a combination.
- Story and character: whether the plot has shape and the people or creatures at its center feel particular and compelling.
- Emotional and thematic force: how well the film makes its ideas felt rather than merely stated.
- Originality and influence: what it contributes to animation or storytelling, without treating technical novelty as a substitute for quality.
- Rewatchability: whether details, performances, and formal choices reward another viewing.
Awards help establish recognition, not a universal hierarchy. The Academy’s 2026 ceremony page concerns films released in 2025 and includes Animated Feature Film as a category; that annual award cannot decide the best animated features across four decades. (Academy Awards, 2026 ceremony)
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