The 50 Best Animated Movies | Empire Magazine
For nearly 100 years, the animated movie as we know it has existed – an artform that, like live-action cinema, sprung from shorts and grew into a major medium in its own right. If the biggest landmark was the arrival of 1937’s Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs – which marked the start of feature-length output from Walt Disney Animation Studios – from there the animated film flourished and evolved, spawning brand new pioneering technologies, new narrative possibilities, new studios, and new visual styles. Today, that gives us a field that encompasses nearly a century of Disney favourites, other major studios like the game-changing Pixar, British claymation titans Aardman, and Japan’s legendary Ghibli, and styles that range from traditional hand-drawn 2D features, to lavish computer-generation confections, painstakingly-produced stop-motion, and everything in between. Team Empire got together to vote for the 50 greatest animated movies ever made – and since animation is a medium rather than a genre, the full list comprises a banquet of tastes and tones. We have traditional family adventures, black-and-white coming-of-age stories, self-referential meta-features, superhero stories, devastating war films, and imaginative flights of fantasy – all showing that animation can be far more than just cartoons for kids (though we do, of course, love those deeply too).
47 picks · Ranked list
