These ten films make a case for animation’s importance across nearly a century: they changed what feature animation could look like, tell, or mean. This is an editorial ranking, not a definitive canon. “Essential” here means historically or artistically consequential, with lasting formal or emotional power—not universally agreed upon. The list spans hand-drawn, computer-generated, and anime traditions; other rankings could make more room for stop-motion, documentary animation, short films, or experimental work.
How this ranking defines “essential”
No single list settles the question of the greatest animated films of all time. The BFI’s curated selection, AFI’s animation category, and TIME’s broader all-time list offer useful reference points, but they do not establish one objective order. This ranking weighs five considerations:
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- Historical influence: whether a film helped shape what followed.
- Artistic ambition: how fully it realizes a distinctive vision.
- Craft or production innovation: what it demonstrates about animation’s possibilities.
- Cultural reach: how widely its images and ideas have traveled.
- Continued power: whether it remains affecting or formally compelling.
These are complementary, not interchangeable measures. A technical milestone need not be the most emotionally intimate film, and a quiet work can be essential without changing an entire industry.
The 10 most essential animated movies, ranked
1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Its place at number one rests on historical consequence. Snow White established an enduring model for the American animated feature: a sustained story, expressive characters, and a world built to hold an audience’s attention for a full-length film. It is a foundational landmark, not a claim that every later achievement descends from one tradition. AFI includes it in its animation category, whose definition covers images created primarily by computer or by hand, with characters voiced by actors. AFI’s animation category gives the film a useful institutional reference point.
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2. Pinocchio (1940)
This placement is a craft judgment. Pinocchio is a peak example of character animation used to make a story’s emotional and physical stakes legible: movement, expression, and visual detail all contribute to the telling. Its case here is not a claim that a published list assigns it this rank, but that expressive animation can deepen character rather than merely decorate a plot.
3. Fantasia (1940)
Fantasia argues that animation need not be organized around conventional dialogue or a single narrative. Its musical structure makes visual movement, rhythm, and composition central to the experience. It earns its place for formal ambition: the medium can interpret music through images, not just illustrate a spoken story.
4. My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Hayao Miyazaki’s film makes quiet observation feel expansive. Its everyday rhythms and child’s-eye view offer a counterweight to animation built around constant plot escalation, while its place in this list recognizes anime as essential to the medium’s history. The BFI notes Totoro among the highest animated entries in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics’ poll, a sign of its standing beyond its original audience. The BFI’s discussion of the poll supplies that reference.
5. Toy Story (1995)
Toy Story marked a major change in feature-animation production and public expectations. TIME describes it as “the first full-length film created wholly on computers.” Its significance is not that computer animation replaced hand-drawn work, but that it became a compelling mainstream feature form in its own right. TIME’s all-time animated-film list uses that milestone to frame the film’s importance.
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6. The Iron Giant (1999)
This hand-drawn feature belongs in the ranking partly because it complicates a simple story of technological succession. As computer animation gained prominence, The Iron Giant showed the continuing expressive force of drawn design and character-led storytelling. Its emotional impact and visual identity are the grounds for this editorial placement, rather than a claim of consensus or a particular poll result.
7. Spirited Away (2001)
Miyazaki builds a spirit world that feels strange without losing the texture of ordinary human concerns. The film follows a young heroine through a shifting landscape of work, fear, and transformation; its imaginative scale is matched by close attention to her experience. The BFI records it as a 2001 film and includes it in the Sight & Sound greatest-films poll. Its page calls it “simply cinema at its best.” The BFI’s Spirited Away entry provides that critical context.
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8. WALL-E (2008)
WALL-E combines popular entertainment with formal ambition, using visual storytelling to make its environmental themes accessible. Its inclusion reflects how computer animation can communicate through movement, image, and atmosphere as well as dialogue. This is a reasoned placement, not a claim about a specific reception statistic.
9. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013)
Isao Takahata’s film stands out for a hand-drawn visual language that feels unusually immediate and fluid. Its inclusion recognizes a distinctive late-career achievement and makes room for a form of animation whose importance cannot be measured only by technical novelty or industrial influence. The placement is an editorial judgment, not a rank established by the cited lists.
10. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
This film represents contemporary reinvention: computer animation is used to create a deliberately layered, graphic style rather than to approximate a single smooth visual surface. Its place at number ten is a forward-looking choice about the medium’s continued capacity for formal experimentation, not a claim that the cited lists establish this exact selection or order.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What a different ranking might change
A list built around different priorities could make a different case. Give more weight to international cinemas and it may include other national traditions; prioritize stop-motion, documentary animation, or short films and the boundaries of a feature-focused list shift. A popular-cultural measure will also produce different choices from one centered on formal experimentation. Those disagreements are useful: they reveal which version of “essential” a ranking values.
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