The name of Disney and its subsidiary Pixar are synonymous with animation. For multiple generations, the two companies have been producing animated films that brought amazement and wonder to audiences across the globe. Transporting them into brightly colored animated worlds for 90 minutes at a time, allowing them to forget their real-world troubles.

In recent years, Disney and Pixar have maintained their animation crowns, but not without stiff competition. As other studios realize the benefits of animation, they are ever more eager to add animated films to their slate. Advances in technology make it possible for anyone to create cinema-quality animation, no matter how small their studio is.

10 Puss in Boots: The Last Wish Revived a Beloved Character

Through stunning visuals and captivating storytelling, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish captured audiences of all ages, offering a delightful escapade filled with adventure, friendship, and the enduring spirit of Antonio Banderas’s feline hero. After one too many misadventures, Puss finds that he’s used eight of his nine lives.

Accompanied by feisty feline Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek Pinault), Puss sets out to retrieve his nine lives while outwitting the physical manifestation of Death (Wagner Moura) along the way. The Last Wish proved that Dreamworks still has what it takes to match the quality of Disney despite slipping in recent years and breathed a fresh lease of life into the Shrek franchise.

9 I Lost My Body is a Hauntingly Meaningful Tale

The hauntingly poignant French animation I Lost My Body fully embraces the abstraction of the medium to tell a story more meaningful than live-action films. The film intertwines the stories of a severed hand on a quest to reunite with its body and the hand’s owner, Naoufel, a young man whose life is marked by loss and longing.

With muted yet beautiful animation, I Lost My Body is a film about loss, connection, and finding meaning in a world full of adversity. The sound design highlights the incredible versatility of touch and is able to make the severed hand a character in its own right without the need for dialogue.

8 Kubo and the Two Strings Created an Immersive Mythological World

The extraordinary stop-motion animation from Laika, Kubo and the Two Strings fully immerses its audience in a magical yet melancholic world. Inspired by Japanese folklore, the film follows Kubo, a child gifted with spinning magical tales. When he accidentally summons a vengeful spirit, Kubo must set off on a quest to uncover his family’s secrets and discover his own magical powers.

Like other Laika animations, Kubo isn’t afraid to challenge and scare its younger audience. It’s a story of adventure but also a fable about love and loss. Never a film to talk down to its audience, Kubo and the Two Strings gives just enough, inviting its viewers to sit and contemplate its world.

7 Your Name Uses Its High Concept for Maximum Impact

Makoto Shinkai’s smash hit anime film Your Name is probably the most richly detailed and beautifully animated on this list, yet underneath that feature is a truly relatable and heartfelt story. The film follows high-school students Taki Tachibana and Mitsuha Miyamizu, who, despite having no other connection, start to intermittently swap bodies.

Although it’s a premise that could easily fall into juvenile melodrama, Your Name is always true to its characters, who quickly realize that despite their geographic and social differences, they have a lot in common. When the body swapping stops as mysteriously as it began, Taki finds himself unable to communicate with Mitsuha, leading to a final twist that cements the film’s status.

6 Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a Cautionary Tale

Guillermo del Toro’s first foray into animation, Pinocchio, might also be the work that best captures the director’s love for outsiders and his complex views on the human condition. Del Toro takes the classic story, adds an amazing cast and moves it forward in time by just a few years to set it, first during the Great War and then later to a time when Italy was ruled by fascist dictator Mussolini.

The film, which embraces all the imperfections of traditional stop-motion animation, is one of the darkest yet also most human telling of the Pinocchio story. It’s a story where every character is capable of both cruelty and kindness, and the real villain is the compassionless conformity brought on by fascist rule.

5 The Boy and the Heron is the World of an Animation Legend

The most recent film from legendary Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron, is the ultimate culmination of a lifetime of working in the industry. Set in Japan during World War II, the film follows Mahito, a young boy who moves from the city to the countryside after his mother is killed in an air raid.

In the countryside, he follows a mysterious grey heron that leads him into another world. The Boy and the Heron is a film that defies conventional story logic, operating more in a dream state where events and characters manifest, and it is in the gaps between where the real meaning of the story is to be found.

4 Wolfwalkers is a Georgious Irish Adventure

Wolfwalkers is the concluding part and the crowning accomplishment of the Irish Folklore Trilogy. Set in Ireland in 1650, as colonizers from Britain are taking charge, the film follows Robyn, the daughter of a hunter forced to live in a town that doesn’t want her. When following her father into the woods, Robyn encounters Mebh, a Wolfwalker who can inhabit the body of a wolf while her human form sleeps.

With watercolor-style animation, Wolfwalkers stands out from its contemporaries that strive for ever more perfection from computer-generated animation. It’s a style that gives the film life as its characters run through this action-packed adventure, rich with subtext about colonialism and humankind’s place in nature.

3 Flee is a Unique Blending of Mediums

Flee made history in 2022, becoming the first film to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Animated, Best International, and Best Documentary Feature. The Danish film is a documentary centering on an interview between director Jonas Poher and his long-time friend and Afgan refugee Amin Nawab. The stories told by Nawab in the interview are recreated with stark and bold animation, augmented with some live-action archive footage.

The film details Nawab’s memories of growing up in Afghanistan and his journey of escape to Denmark, as well as exploring his homosexuality. The animation within Flee draws the audience into the story and makes the experience more intermate than it otherwise would be without the blending of mediums.

2 The Red Turtle is Wildly Immersive

Of all the films mentioned thus far, The Red Turtle is the one that most effectively transports its viewer into its fantastical world because caring about the world is the whole point of the film. Told without dialogue, the film follows the journey of a man who is shipwrecked on a desert island.

All his attempts to escape are thwarted by a mysterious Red Turtle that can also turn into a beautiful woman. The Red Turtle is not a film about story or characters but about complete immersion in its world. It shows what can happen if humans completely give themselves to nature, obsessing over all the details that make such a prospect so beautiful.

1 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Expanded the Possibilities of Animation

With Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and its sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Sony animation proved that there were ways to evolve the medium of high-budget 3D animation outside the extreme perfection and detail strove for by Disney/Pixar. Following Miles Morales as he becomes Spider-Man and his subsequent adventures with Spider-People from across the multiverse, Spider-Verse brings comic book style to the big screen.

Both films are pure explosions of color and heart, using the full power of the animated medium to capture the emotions of their characters in a way that’s impossible in live-action. They seem to break the rules of big-budget studio animation, which spent so many years chasing fidelity that they forgot the uniqueness the medium brings. The audience rewarded Spider-Verse for its bold swing, leaving other studios hunting to find their own style.