The 10 Best Animated Movies Ever Made

Hayao Miyazaki's fantasy about a girl trapped in a spirit-world bathhouse is the one film every list agreed on. Every engine put it first. It's inventive, strange, tender and endlessly rewatchable.

The first fully computer-animated feature changed the medium overnight. Woody and Buzz still deliver sharp jokes and real heart, and the film remains a model of tight storytelling. Two engines had it at #2.

A comic-book collage come to life, with its Ben-Day dots, frame-rate play and Miles Morales at the center. It rewrote what an animated blockbuster could look like, and it made every list.

A lonely trash-compacting robot carries a nearly silent first act and a love story that needs almost no dialogue. Pixar's boldest swing is also one of its most moving, and it landed in every top 10.

Disney's Shakespearean savanna epic has the songs, the stampede and the most famous dad-death in cartoons. Gemini ranked it near the very top, while ChatGPT often left it out.

Miyazaki's darker, grander epic pits forest gods against an iron-making town, with no simple villain in sight. It's a landmark of environmental storytelling and hand-drawn spectacle, and it made all three top 10s.

Isao Takahata's devastating story of two siblings surviving wartime Japan is animation at its most humane and heartbreaking. It's hard to watch twice and impossible to forget, which is why it appeared on every list.

Disney's 1940 puppet-turned-boy tale still impresses with lush multiplane artistry and real menace. Its place is old-school, with ChatGPT sometimes ranking it very high while the others mostly skipped it.

Katsuhiro Otomo's cyberpunk landmark of motorcycle gangs, psychic powers and a collapsing Neo-Tokyo opened the door to anime for global audiences. Its hand-drawn detail still looks astonishing.

Miyazaki's gentle tale of two sisters and the giant forest spirit next door runs on wonder, not conflict. Claude regularly listed it, while Gemini left it out entirely. The Catbus alone earns it a seat.