Best Animated Movies (Non-Ghibli)
Settle it: two at a time →Take Miyazaki off the table and the argument gets interesting. Any animated feature from any studio or country qualifies, hand drawn, stop motion, or computer generated, with Ghibli alone excluded so the rest of the field can breathe. The ranking is about which films work as films: story, craft, and whether an adult rewatches them without a child in the room. Studio polish competes with anime landmarks and scrappy stop motion here, and affection for whatever you grew up on is fair, as long as it survives a rewatch.
Ranked by 1 person · 15 items
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is first on the one ballot cast so far.
Global Ranking
It changed what mainstream animation was allowed to look like, halftone dots and mixed frame rates included, and half the studio output since has copied its homework. Underneath the visuals sits a boilerplate origin story; it wins on style, not script.
Hand drawn Disney at full power: the Zimmer score, a stampede that still stuns, a villain drop with real weight. Strip the songs away, though, and it is Hamlet abridged to the point of thinness; the middle sags on every rewatch.
The film that proved computer animation could carry feeling, not just geometry, and Buzz's delusion remains a great story engine. The rendering has aged worse than anything else here; the humans look like haunted mannequins.
The rare sequel that outruns its original, with Puss in Boots arriving fully formed and the Fairy Godmother plot giving the jokes an actual spine. The pop culture gags date it badly on rewatch, which is exactly the trap The Incredibles avoids.
A midlife crisis movie smuggled into a superhero picture, and the family arguments land harder than the action. Its take on domestic resentment goes places Toy Story never risks. The third act is chase scenes and little else.
The 1988 anime that dragged animation into adult territory for a global audience, with hand drawn Neo-Tokyo detail nobody has matched at that scale since. It compresses a sprawling manga so hard the ending barely parses on a first viewing.
A kids' movie that walks straight at death, memory, and being forgotten, then lands its climactic song hard enough to wreck a full theater. It leans on a twist villain you can see coming from the second act, a habit this studio era never kicked.
Stop motion with genuine menace, button eyes that unsettle more than most live action horror, and a slow first act that loses exactly the kids it was aimed at; Laika has never topped it.
Wes Anderson treats stop motion fur and deadpan line readings as the same material, and the result is funnier than anything else here. It is also the biggest acquired taste on the list; every character speaks in one voice, and that voice is Anderson's.
The ocean gave the animators their best canvas, Dory is the best comic relief in the studio's catalog, and the fish tank scheming is tighter than it gets credit for. As a story it is a straight line: lose the kid, find the kid. Coco carries heavier freight.
The flight scenes set to John Powell's score are the closest DreamWorks ever got to pure wonder, and Toothless is a full character without one line of dialogue. Around the dragon, the Viking village writing is strictly stock parts.
The most adult argument Pixar ever made, about criticism, gatekeeping, and who gets to make art, wrapped in a kitchen farce that actually understands food. The rat-under-the-hat puppeteering asks for more suspension of disbelief than anything in WALL-E.
Brad Bird's hand drawn debut, a Cold War fable with the single best gut-punch line in American animation. It died in theaters and was rescued by home video, and its emotional economy makes The Incredibles look talky.
The married-life montage near the start does more in a few minutes than most features manage in two hours. Nothing after it can match it; the talking dogs and the bird chase feel imported from a lighter film. How much you forgive that drop is the whole debate.
The first half is a nearly wordless silent comedy that trusts its audience completely, which no other studio film on this list dares to do. Once the humans show up, the satire turns broad and the movie never quite recovers its nerve.
