There is no objective, universal ranking of the greatest animated TV shows. This list treats “greatest” as a judgment about influence, storytelling, visual and sound craft, memorable characters, cultural reach, and lasting appeal—not simply ratings, awards, or episode counts. It covers animated television series across children’s and adult audiences, comedy and drama, episodic and serialized storytelling, and international as well as American traditions. Films, specials, and short-form web pieces are outside its scope.
The ranking is an editorial selection, not a poll or a claim of consensus. Rotten Tomatoes’ guide to 140 essential animated shows says it considered critic-review data, other best-of lists, and editorial judgment about which series hold up, influence later artists, shape culture, and create lasting characters. TVLine’s January 6, 2026 ranking is a separate, shorter editorial list. Their different selections and scopes are a reminder that the order below is an argument, not a settled fact.
How this ranking weighs greatness
Each show is considered in the context of its aims and audience. A children’s adventure should not have to resemble adult satire to rank highly, and an episodic comedy need not imitate a serialized drama. The order weighs six related qualities: influence on later animation; writing and character development; visual and sound craft; world-building; cultural impact and recognition; and how well the series delivers the experience it set out to create. When titles are close, the tie-breaker is the breadth of their achievement across those qualities.
Published rankings differ. In Rotten Tomatoes’ guide, The Simpsons is #1, Batman: The Animated Series #2, and South Park #5; those positions belong to that guide, not to an objective consensus. TVLine’s 2026 list of 15 includes series as varied as Avatar: The Last Airbender, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Duckman, Rick and Morty, SpongeBob SquarePants, Aeon Flux, and Batman: The Animated Series. The 32 below are this article’s editorial ranking.
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The 32 greatest animated TV shows
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The Simpsons
A sharply observed family sitcom that grew into a portrait of American life, The Simpsons combines a flexible comic format with characters and jokes that became part of the wider culture. Its influence is visible in how later animated comedies use the family home as a setting for social satire. Its high point is the way a familiar Springfield story can be both absurd and emotionally legible.
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Batman: The Animated Series
Batman: The Animated Series gave superhero animation a distinctive noir mood, expressive art direction, and a serious approach to character and consequence. Its compact stories made Gotham feel coherent without requiring viewers to follow a sprawling plot. The series helped show that animation could deliver an atmospheric, sophisticated take on a comic-book world.
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Avatar: The Last Airbender
Avatar balances a playful travel adventure with an unusually complete coming-of-age story. Its elemental combat, carefully designed cultures, and evolving ensemble support a narrative with consequences and a clear destination. It earns its place by making character growth and world-building feel inseparable from the action.
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South Park
South Park turned crude visual simplicity into a vehicle for topical, confrontational satire. Its small-town setting gives the series a steady cast of comic voices, while its willingness to take aim at institutions and public controversies has kept it culturally prominent. Its strength is not polish but a distinctive, instantly recognizable comic point of view.
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SpongeBob SquarePants
SpongeBob SquarePants built an enduring comedy from eccentric characters, elastic visual gags, and an undersea world that can support both sweetness and surrealism. Its humor works for children without being limited to them, and its characters have become widely recognizable well beyond the screen.
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BoJack Horseman
BoJack Horseman uses the language of an adult animated comedy to examine addiction, regret, fame, and responsibility. Its Hollywood animals and show-business satire create a comic surface, but the series’ strongest work comes from allowing personal damage to accumulate rather than disappear at the end of an episode.
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Adventure Time
Adventure Time begins as a bright fantasy romp and gradually reveals a stranger, more melancholic world. Its imaginative settings and playful visual language make room for stories about friendship, loss, memory, and change. Few series shift tone so freely while keeping their emotional center intact.
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King of the Hill
King of the Hill finds comedy in routine, regional habits, and the gap between what people believe and what they do. Its restrained style and patient character writing distinguish it from louder animated sitcoms. The result is an unusually humane portrait of a family and community.
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Futurama
Futurama turns science-fiction ideas into a versatile sitcom engine. Its future setting supports visual invention and elaborate jokes, while the central group gives the show a dependable emotional anchor. At its best, it moves from a technical gag to genuine tenderness without making either feel out of place.
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Samurai Jack
Samurai Jack tells much of its story through composition, movement, silence, and music. Its minimal dialogue and changing visual styles make the journey of a displaced warrior feel mythic rather than merely episodic. Metacritic’s catalog records a historical Season One DVD box-set release plan covering the first 13 episodes; that record does not establish current stock, completeness of any edition, or regional compatibility. Metacritic’s Samurai Jack catalog entry
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Rick and Morty
Rick and Morty combines science-fiction spectacle with a volatile family dynamic and a taste for bleak, self-aware comedy. Its multiverse offers near-limitless story premises, but the series is most effective when those concepts expose the cost of Rick’s nihilism or the strain his behavior puts on others.
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Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is a tightly plotted fantasy adventure built around sacrifice, ambition, and the limits of power. Its large ensemble and political conflicts serve a clear central journey, while its action has emotional stakes rooted in the characters’ choices. It represents the range of international animated television that a serious all-time list should include.
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Arcane
Arcane pairs painterly, meticulously composed visuals with a character-driven story about family, class, and political fracture. Its fantasy setting is accessible even to viewers unfamiliar with its game-world origins. The series demonstrates how contemporary animation can make visual experimentation integral to dramatic storytelling.
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Over the Garden Wall
This compact miniseries creates a folkloric world through autumnal imagery, musical interludes, and a carefully controlled sense of unease. Its short form is a strength: every encounter adds to the atmosphere and to the relationship between its two brothers. It proves that an animated series need not run for years to leave a lasting impression.
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Beavis and Butt-Head
Beavis and Butt-Head made teenage obliviousness into a sharply defined comic style. Their crude drawings and blank reactions are part of the joke, not a limitation to conceal. The show’s influence lies in its commitment to an intentionally narrow perspective and its send-up of music television and youth culture.
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Neon Genesis Evangelion
Neon Genesis Evangelion begins with the machinery of a giant-robot action series and turns inward, using apocalyptic conflict to explore isolation, fear, and the need for connection. Its psychological intensity and striking visual choices made it a major reference point for later animated drama, though its deliberately unsettling approach is not for every viewer.
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Looney Tunes
Looney Tunes is a foundational body of animated comedy built on timing, expressive movement, musical precision, and characters whose personalities are legible in a glance. Its short cartoons are not one continuous television narrative, but the series’ recurring characters and enduring presence on television make it essential to animation’s history and craft.
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Duckman
Duckman uses a cynical private investigator and a dysfunctional family to deliver abrasive adult comedy. Its angular visual design and acerbic voice give it a character distinct from more conventional animated sitcoms. TVLine’s 2026 ranking includes it among its selected best animated series, a useful sign of its continuing place in discussions of the form.
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He-Man and the Masters of the Universe
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe helped define a vivid, toyetic fantasy vocabulary for a generation of television animation. Its straightforward heroic conflicts and memorable character designs are part of its appeal; its historical significance is also tied to the era’s close relationship between animated series and consumer entertainment. TVLine’s 2026 list includes the series among its all-time selections.
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She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power reimagines a familiar fantasy premise as a character-led ensemble adventure. Its friendships, rivalries, and shifting loyalties give its long-form conflict emotional texture, while its bright design keeps the world inviting. It shows how a revival can honor a recognizable foundation while making its own priorities clear.
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The Venture Bros.
The Venture Bros. builds a layered comedy from the debris of adventure fiction, superhero stories, and family dysfunction. Its references reward familiarity with old genre conventions, but its characters develop beyond the parody. The series’ long view lets a joke about a failed hero or sidekick become the basis for surprisingly rich character work.
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Gravity Falls
Gravity Falls combines a summer mystery with warm sibling comedy and an unusually dense trail of clues. Its Pacific Northwest setting, strange creatures, and secret codes make the world feel inviting to explore, while the central family relationships give the mysteries emotional stakes.
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Dragon Ball Z
Dragon Ball Z helped establish the scale and rhythm of action anime for an international television audience. Its escalating battles, training arcs, and iconic characters have influenced generations of action storytelling. Its pacing can be expansive, but that very scale is part of the form it helped popularize.
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Steven Universe
Steven Universe uses colorful fantasy and musical storytelling to explore empathy, identity, grief, and conflict resolution. Its world expands alongside its young protagonist, and its character relationships carry much of the drama. The show’s warmth is not a retreat from difficult subjects; it is the method through which it approaches them.
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Bluey
Bluey turns everyday family play into nimble, emotionally perceptive storytelling. Its short episodes capture how children invent rules and adults learn to join in, with humor that respects both perspectives. Its intimate scale offers a different kind of ambition from epic fantasy or satire, and it succeeds on its own terms.
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Batman Beyond
Batman Beyond reworks the Batman premise for a futuristic Gotham and a new generation. Its cyberpunk setting gives the franchise a fresh visual identity, while the relationship between young successor and aging mentor provides a compelling human core. It is both a continuation and a confident reinvention.
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Samurai Champloo
Samurai Champloo fuses a historical road story with hip-hop-inflected music and anachronistic style. Its episodic encounters make room for comedy and experimentation, while the central trio’s uneasy companionship supplies continuity. The series stands out for making its sound and movement central to its identity.
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Phineas and Ferb
Phineas and Ferb turns a summer vacation into a repeatable, meticulously structured comedy. Its formula invites invention rather than staleness: each episode reshapes familiar pieces into new projects, songs, and comic collisions. The show’s optimism and precision make its repetition part of the pleasure.
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Æon Flux
Æon Flux is a visually radical science-fiction series that trusts atmosphere, movement, and ambiguity over conventional explanation. Its unsettling imagery and fragmented storytelling make it an outlier even within adult animation. TVLine’s 2026 ranking includes it, reflecting the continuing recognition of its distinctive formal ambition.
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Avatar: The Legend of Korra
The Legend of Korra takes the world of Avatar into a more industrial, politically complex era. Its protagonist’s growth is shaped by public responsibility as well as private doubt, and its changing settings give the franchise a different visual and thematic texture. It is most rewarding when judged as its own story rather than as a repetition of its predecessor.
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Undone
Undone uses rotoscoped imagery and a fractured sense of time to tell a story about family, grief, and reality. Its visual technique is not decorative: the shifting surfaces help viewers inhabit the protagonist’s uncertainty. The series shows how animation can make interior experience visible in ways live action may approach differently.
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What We Do in the Shadows: The Animated Series
Excluded: this title is not an animated television series established by the cited evidence. The live-action comedy’s existence is not enough to justify including an animated counterpart in an all-time ranking.
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Primal
Primal builds a near-wordless adventure around a caveman and a dinosaur forced into an uneasy alliance. Its expressive animation and physical storytelling make danger, grief, and companionship comprehensible without relying on dialogue. It earns recognition for the clarity and force of its visual narrative.
Finding a show to watch
The ranking is a guide to choosing a kind of experience, not a guarantee that every title is available in your country or on a particular service. Metacritic offers a streaming-service filter on its browse page, but a filter alone does not verify current title availability or territory. Catalogues, physical editions, and regional compatibility change; check the service or retailer directly for the title and edition you want. Metacritic’s TV browse page
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