Empire's The 50 Best Animated Movies

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By Ben Travis, James White, Ian Freer, Beth Webb | Posted On 14 09 2021

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). Read the full list below, and delve into the endless possibilities that the animated medium allows for.