The 25 best animated films ranked — from Snow White to Up

• Analysis: how animated family movies saved the box office

25. Frozen (2013, Disney+)

Disney spent ten years trying to adapt Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Snow Queen and the result was this shimmering, frosted fantasy. It tells a simple yet compelling tale of two sisters, one with icy powers, and a snowman named Olaf who likes summer days. It has become a cultural touchstone that has spread its icy tips across the globe with merchandise, stage shows and ice shows — until Frozen 2 in 2019 it was the highest grossing animated film. Crammed with earworms, this is the movie your children won’t let you forget, no matter how hard you try to, err, let it go.

24. Inside Out (2015, Disney+)

It’s a perennial question: what actually goes on inside our heads? Pixar’s imaginative film follows Riley, an ice-hockey obsessed 11-year-old, as she moves to San Francisco. But she isn’t the star of the show. Instead, viewers get a peek inside her mind where anthropomorphised versions of emotions — Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, Anger — struggle to keep control. It’s an abstract premise delivered with giddy, colourful characters. The film is at once a tearjerker and pure joy. Its sequel became the highest-grossing animated film ever.

23. The Jungle Book (1967, Disney+)

In 1967 Disney needed a hit: the response to the studio’s previous feature The Sword in the Stone (1963) had been lacklustre and Walt had died of lung cancer at 65 the year before. Luckily they had this lively animated adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling classic in the bag. Stuffed with exuberant characters and a jumpin’ score, this film is pure fun. The star is Baloo, the loveable bear, and his infectious track The Bare Necessities. It was the last film overseen by Walt Disney — a magical note to bow out on.

22. James and the Giant Peach (1996, buy/rent)

Henry Sellick’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic about a boy riding in a giant, runaway peach with a crew of ugly bugs matches Dahl’s mixture of spikiness and sparkiness almost exactly — the storytelling has a helium bounce thanks to inspired voice work by Simon Callow, Joanna Lumley, Richard Dreyfuss and Miriam Margolyes. The best Dahl adaptation before Wes Anderson got to work.

21. Monsters Inc (2001, Disney+)

It’s not your typical plot for a children’s film: monsters elicit screams from children to power their glistening metropolis. Yet this is packed with warmth and cheerful high energy, delivered by a hairy blue-purple monster called Sulley, voiced by John Goodman, and his green pal Mike (Billy Crystal). At its heart it’s a tale of confronting one’s fears, but it never becomes bogged down. It’s full of gleeful gags and silliness (odorants called Wet Dog and Low Tide). How did it lose the Oscar to Shrek? A travesty.

20. Fantastic Mr Fox (2009, Disney+)

This stop-motion animation and ingenious adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel comes from the mind of one of Hollywood’s most idiosyncratic directors: Wes Anderson. The director, a lifelong Dahl fan who read the book as a child in Texas, teams up with the co-writer Noah Baumbach to dream up a story that extends beyond the poultry-stealing fox (voiced by George Clooney) and greedy farmers. This is a world of misfits, disaffected parents and troubled teenagers. Plus, there’s a farmhand voiced by the pop singer Jarvis Cocker.

19. Alice (1988, Mubi)

The Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer’s stop-motion version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one to give even adults the jitters. Alice’s transformations unfold with the logic of a bad dream, in which everyday objects — playing cards, china dolls, croquet mallets — take on spooky life and significance. Sure, there is some live action there, but it’s directed in a way that never distracts from the spectacular animation. Knocks the Disney version into a mad hatter’s hat.

18. My Neighbor Totoro (1988, Netflix)

Hayao Miyazaki’s magical film is about two sisters who move to a creaky house near the hospital where their mother is being treated. They explore a visually enchanting world of their invention, a fantasy realm with a big, cuddly forest spirit and a “catbus”. Its friendly characters delight children, but its themes of wonderment and the thrill of exploration are great enough to awaken anyone’s inner child. The stage adaptation became a monster hit in the West End.

17. Pinocchio (1940, Disney+)

Walt Disney didn’t like the Pinocchio of Carlo Calodi’s source novel very much and invented the character of Jiminy Cricket to give him a conscience, thus bequeathing to the studio its theme song: When You Wish Upon a Star, sung heartbreakingly by the singer-comedian Cliff Edwards. But the film remains one of the darker Disneys, and is all the more memorable for it. Remember how terrifying it is when Pinocchio transforms into a donkey?

16. Waltz with Bashir (2008, buy/rent)

Think animation can’t tackle challenging subject matter? Just watch this haunting movie, which brings to life the dreams and traumatic memories of the Israeli soldiers who fought with Lebanese forces against the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Syria in the 1982 Lebanon war. The Israeli director Ari Folman uses his shattered recollections as a soldier during the conflict and interviews with others who were there to create a nightmarish vision, a vivid and brutal portrait of the horrors of war. Still as pertinent as ever, this is a stunning anti-war film.

15. The Wild Robot (2024)

Chris Sanders has crafted a joyous film — warm, wise and funny — about oddball parenting. It tells the story of a robot (Lupita Nyong’o) who is washed up on the shore and has to adapt to its new surroundings. The director has focused his movie on the emotions and experience of parenthood, particularly when those parents happen to be slightly different. Anybody who has found themselves thrust into parenthood without a user’s manual — which is to say, just about everybody — will feel understood. Knockouts don’t come much cleaner than this.
Read our full review of TheWild Robot

14. Watership Down (1978, in cinemas from Oct 25)

Martin Rosen’s labour-of-love adaptation of Richard Adams’s bestseller about a warren of Hampshire rabbits forced into exile, featuring the voices of John Hurt, Richard Briars and Nigel Hawthorne, is not for those craving Disney cuteness. It’s a bloody, tooth-and-claw survival epic, bristling with violent predators and lurking threats, aimed at old souls who can still hum the tune to Art Garfunkel’s melancholy theme song, Bright Eyes.

13. Up (2009, Disney+)

Is there a more traumatic movie scene than the first ten minutes of this animation? It captures the life of Carl (voiced by Ed Asner), the 78-year-old widower, from first love to the death of his wife. Heartbreaking. Next up, an adventure to visit the mythical lost worlds of South America, courtesy of the thousands of balloons he ties to the roof of his house. His companion is a freckled eight-year-old named Russell (Jordan Nagai). The film, which opened at Cannes in 2009, has a simple message: you’re never too old for an adventure. Just wonderful.

12. The Incredibles (2004, Disney+)

Brad Bird’s retro-futurist hymn to space-age architecture, Bond villain lairs, couturiers inspired by the costume designer Edith Head (“Dahlink!”) and jetpacks — what more could you want? The zippiest Pixar, as well as the funniest, The Incredibles is executed with more craft, invention and wit than most of the superhero movies it spoofs.

11. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993, Disney+)

This started life as a poem that Tim Burton wrote while working as a junior animator at Disney. It became a witty, dark, wonderfully inventive fable about a takeover of Christmas by a village of spindly Halloween ghouls. The film mixes dark barbs and twinkly charm. Burton’s Edward Gorey-style designs receive cantering accompaniment in Danny Elfman’s antic score so that the production at times seems possessed by some mischievous spirit.

10. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018, Sky/Now)

After a torrent of half-baked superhero films, this animation felt refreshing. Produced by The Lego Movie’s Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, its innovative design, quick-witted humour and mind-bending storytelling took modern animation into a different universe. At the centre of the tale is Miles Morales, a Brooklyn schoolboy, who teams up with all sorts of spider heroes, including a jaded middle-aged Spider-Man and a radioactive pig. The Oscar winner for best animated feature is busy but never overwhelming. It’s zippy, entertaining — and proved there was life yet in caped crusaders.

9. Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers (1993, iPlayer)

Before Nick Park’s work acquired the scale and spectacle of Hollywood features, The Wrong Trousers with its techno trousers and penguin arch-villain got the balance with the more humdrum, homespun elements of the series exactly right. The film may be just 30 minutes long, but it took eight months to make. And the climax, featuring a death-defying run round a train set is an unimprovable mixture of thrills and slapstick. Buster Keaton would be proud.

8. Beauty and the Beast (1991, Disney+)

Howard Ashman was dying of Aids when he wrote the lyrics for this glorious film with the composer Alan Menken. The duo had resurrected Disney’s fortunes in the 1980s with The Little Mermaid, but this was their magnum opus, a tale of a headstrong bibliophile who is held captive by a beast. Steeped in enchanting moments and bursting with colourful characters, this film looks gorgeous and combines the traditions of the past with the spectacle of a Broadway musical. It earned the first best picture Oscar nomination for an animated movie, an impressive feat for a medium so often dismissed.

7. Wall-E (2008, Disney+)

One small step for a robot, one giant leap for animation. Pixar’s epic space adventure, about the last robot left on Earth, was an impressive move forward in technology, proving that animation could make you forget what you’re watching isn’t real. Andrew Stanton, who started his career as a writer on Toy Story, directs the tale of a droid clearing up the mess that mankind left behind while they’re getting fat on space cruises. Much of it unfolds like a silent movie with the whirring bot’s only accompaniment, at the start, an old Betamax tape of Hello, Dolly!. The artistic risk pays off — it’s animation’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

6. Snow White (1937, Disney+)

The Citizen Kane of animated features, the one that proved that a full-length animated feature was even possible, swept along by the obsession and storytelling verve of Walt Disney. While making it, he could practically run the entire film — every cut, fade-out, line of dialogue — in his sleep. The big gamble to make this — Walt’s “folly” — paid off and more than just a film, a new form was born. Adriana Caselotti, who was the voice of Snow White, was not credited for her role. She went on to have small parts in The Wizard of Oz and It’s a Wonderful Life (singing in Martini’s bar).

5. The Lion King (1994, Disney+)

Of all the more recent Disneys The Lion King is the one with the simplicity of old — it’s basically Bambi in Africa — but the desert landscapes, soaring songs and basso profundo of James Earl Jones all give Rob Minkoff and Roger Allers’s film an epic sweep worthy of that continent. So dedicated were the animators that lions were brought into the studio to study. The voice work is among Disney’s best and Jeremy Irons’s Scar the most seductive Disney bad guy since Shere Khan.

4. Spirited Away (2001, Netflix)

This film, which won the director Hayao Miyazaki his first Oscar, centres on ten-year-old Chihiro, whose family’s move to a new town takes a fantastical turn. Her parents have turned into pigs and she’s soon on a journey with supernatural beings, including a six-legged man and a grotesque sludge creature in a psychedelic bath house. It knows that it’s weird, that it’s not very Disney — but that doesn’t stop us from admiring its beauty and brashness. This is animation as art and Miyazaki’s most outlandish and ambitious Studio Ghibli picture.

3. Bambi (1942, Disney+)

Completed in the aftermath of the death of Walt Disney’s mother, Bambi’s purity of line and emotion make it the most poetic of all the Disneys. The storytelling has the economy and enchantment of fable. The first Disney feature to do without humans, except as a threat, it’s a film children can just pour themselves into. They are Bambi and Thumper. Originally there was a shot in the scene where Bambi’s mother dies, but the screenwriter Larry Morey felt that it was more powerful to have it happen off screen.

2. The Iron Giant (1999, buy/rent)

The characters of Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man are transplanted from 1950s England to rural Maine with barely a scratch, unlike the crash-landed robot. Like Steven Spielberg’s ET: the Extra-Terrestrial, the film is the simplest of love stories — boy finds robot, boy loses robot, robot slowly reassembles himself screw by screw — told with such sweetness and charm you could forget there’s a cold war going on. It began as a musical with the Who guitarist Pete Townshend involved.

1. Toy Story 3 (2010, Disney+)

The first Toy Story, the first computer-generated feature film, was a mix of groundbreaking tech, narrative ingenuity and heart — the space ranger Buzz proving he’s the real deal by soaring around the bedroom, or as he calls it “falling with style” — but it was Toy Story 3 that had us reaching for the tissues. There is an escape from Colditz, a great Barbie-Ken subplot (with voice work from Michael Keaton and Jodie Benson) and a backstory for Ned Beatty’s Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear that is a small masterpiece of storytelling and heart-tugging pathos. It became the second Pixar film (after Up) to receive an Academy award nomination for best picture. Don’t bother with the mediocre fourth film — this goodbye is the equal of the one in Brief Encounter. Pixar has taken us on a journey with these toys, and this film was a flawless conclusion.

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What’s your favourite animated film? Let us know in the comments below