To honor the rich history of animated feature film making over the years, Joey Armstrong has chosen 50 animated films that have had some of the greatest cultural impact on adults and children alike.
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40 - 31
30. Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
Hayao Miyazaki’s animated adaptation of Diane Wynne Jones’s fantasy novel of the same name is not really an adaptation at all. Much like what Stanley Kubrick did with The Shining and A Clockwork Orange, Miyazaki’s works are all his own. This film is not his best, but it is a great film. Miyazaki never dumbs down his work. And although he vowed to make films for children, the themes, characters, and plots are always complex and demand our attention. His films always feel important.
Howl’s is a hand-drawn masterpiece, really, but it feels less important, perhaps, than his other films. The moving castle itself is a goofy wonder to behold. Although Grandma Sophie, our heroine, looks just like the evil, cigarette-smoking witch in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, we are still bound to root for her. The story is nothing but original and the characters are likable and really freaking cool. Even the villains are folks we are drawn to.
This film is, primarily, a story about building community, even with those who are considered ugly, vain, too young, and evil. I walked away from Howl’s Moving Castle seeing the truth that we are all a little cursed and all a little blessed.
29. Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)
Every great stop-motion animated film from Fantastic Mr. Fox to Wallace and Gromit to the films of Laika and Shaun the Sheep owe something to Larry Roemer’s holiday special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Yes, it’s crudely and, at times, even poorly animated. The songs are cheesy and the characters are underdeveloped and tropey as hell. But, this beloved film has transcended even the category of “film” and has become “event” or “tradition” much in the way that Star Wars or The Wizard of Oz are “traditions.” It’s just not an American Christmas without Burl Ives’s singing narration as Sam the Snowman filling up your TV screen with “Silver and Gold.”
The premise is simple: Rudolph is born to Donner and Mrs. Donner, Santa’s reindeer, in the North Pole. Santa has stopped eating, due to stress, and has lost all of his weight. Rudolph has a glowing red nose which causes the other reindeer to laugh at him and otherwise ostracize him. You know the song.
What makes Roemer’s film truly memorable are the additional characters of Hermey, one of Santa’s elves who wishes to be a dentist, Yukon Cornelius, a bombastic, bearded prospector out to find the silver and gold Sam sings about, the Island of Misfit Toys, and the Bumble aka Abominable Snowman. Aside from the insulting patriarchy of Donner (“This is man’s work!”), this is a memorable and family-friendly gem that paved the way for an entire series of crudely animated, stop-motion holiday specials from producers Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass, and all of the stop-motion films and series to come.
28. Inside Out (2015)
Inside Out is arguably Pixars’s most well-crafted film. We have come to expect a certain “craft” from Pixar films over the years and Pete Docter’s films have continued to deliver. Inside Out doesn’t just deliver; it delivers in spades. Whatever Pixar was aiming for in their first years with Toy Story and A Bug’s Life they have fully accomplished with this film. If Pixar Animation Studios never made another film following Inside Out’s great success, that would be okay, really.
I am hard-pressed to say Inside Out is Pixar’s best film because there is always Toy Story to consider. If this were a list of my all time favorites, the two films would be tied and both be somewhere in my Top 10. Without a doubt, Inside Out was the best film of 2015, as if often the case with Pixar films.
What sets Inside Out apart from other Pixar films is that it makes a case for the primary human character, Riley by name (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias), mattering in such a way that all human beings can relate. Docter introduces Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Riley’s imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind) as part of Riley’s very human experience in the world. The thing is, Riley is a little girl. She’s a little girl who enjoys hockey. She’s a little girl who feels sadness and isn’t dismissed. Her sadness is vital and plays an important role in her experience. If only we all taught our communities in this way.
27. It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)
A brain cancer diagnosis has never felt so accessible and so surreal. Why is it that Don Hertzfeldt’s stick figure, Bill, elicits such an instinctive response from me? Why do I feel like I know him and why is it that I feel for him? He’s a damn stick figure, for crying out loud!
Don Hertzfeldt’s short films are smart and absurd. As a healthcare professional, I can see why he is the perfect person to tell a story about living with cancer in today’s society. Influenced by David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, there are dream scenes in this film that feel like Eraserhead and scenes of meeting the reality of death that feel like the Jupiter Space sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This influence is also keenly felt in Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow (#50 on my list).
While World of Tomorrow feels hopeful and delightfully whimsical in its approach, it doesn’t really feel like a Don Hertzfeldt film. It’s Such a Beautiful Day takes the dark and irreverent humor of Hertzfeldt’s Rejected, Billy’s Balloon, Genre, L’Amour, and Wisdom Teeth and laces it with something that really and truly matters: living with a terminal cancer diagnosis.
26. Dr. Seuss’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)
Dr. Seuss’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas goes down in history as another part of the beloved animated holiday trifecta of films of all time in America: A Charlie Brown Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and How The Grinch Stole Christmas. No matter how old they get, they will always be referred to as “timeless classics” and American families will schedule their holiday break around gathering by the television to view them. Almost every American household with a TV will have all three of these short films playing at some point, make no mistake.
Forget Ron Howard’s mediocre live-action Jim Carrey version of Dr. Seuss’s beloved character. Although the jury is still out, I wouldn’t invest much energy into thinking the Benedict Cumberbatch motion capture version will be all that great either. There is just something about Chuck Jones’s treatment of the Dr. Seuss classic, along with the pitch perfect narration by Boris Karloff, that seals the deal. It’s not a complicated story, but, maybe that’s precisely the point.
25. The Lego Movie (2014)
DISCLAIMER Now that I have entered the Top 25, I am keenly aware that films like Akira and Grave of the Fireflies are not on this list. The reality is, I have never seen these films and so I do not feel that I have enough authority to write about them. My apologies.
I was not expecting to enjoy Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s The Lego Movie. In fact, although I enjoyed Legos as a kid, I had made a fairly strong assumption that this would be a dumb, sensationalist family film. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. What Lord, Miller, and their very talented team have done with this film is truly extraordinary. It’s a stop motion film, certainly, but it’s more than that. Every single piece of animation is done with Legos, which means that even the running water from the Lego shower is Lego water. Every single inch of the screen is covered in Legos. It really is a delight to watch!
Not only is the technique of animation fascinating and exciting to behold but the voice acting is fantastic and the dialogue is witty and funny. Chris Pratt plays the voice of Emmet Brickowoski, a simple Lego guy who enjoys being perfectly ordinary and truly believes that “EVERYTHING IS AWESOME” (the song of the Lego people). It turns out that Will Ferrell’s President Business is using this catchy song, sung by Tegan & Sara and The Lonely Island, to assimilate everyone into uniformity and ignorance to the scandalous behavior and evil ploys going on behind closed Lego doors.
Morgan Freeman as Vitruvius the wizard is hilarious even (SPOILER ALERT) in death. Will Arnett is the perfect choice to play the vain and over-the-top Lego Batman. This film belongs on the shelf next to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s South Park Bigger, Longer, & Uncut as a fierce and hilarious satirical indictment of American society.
24. The Lion King (1994)
When I was a scrappy youth in 1994, the fundamentalist community I was raised in tried to claim Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff’s The Lion King as a Messianic allegory about Jesus Christ. When I was in high school we were assigned several readings from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and suddenly it struck me: This isn’t an allegory for the evangelical Christian right, at all! This is Hamlet! This is culture! This is refined! This matters!
Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff actually do a tremendous job of telling the story of the melancholy Prince of Denmark through the animated African landscape. The film is not only a reverent tribute to Shakespeare but to the beauty of the African wilderness. The themes of light and dark and the Circle of Life also refreshingly usher in Eastern religion and philosophy. Basically, if you are looking for your child to become a well-rounded, compassionate, culturally sensitive human being, show them Disney’s The Lion King.
23. The Secret of NIMH (1982)
Don Bluth started out as part of the animation team on Wolfgang Reitherman’s Disney classic Robin Hood (#32) and the evidence is all over this film. Bluth would go on to bring us such well-loved movies as The Land Before Time and An American Tail, neither of which made this list. But there’s something about Bluth’s ability to animate adorable and horrifying woodland critters, while putting them in epic situations, and placing medieval weaponry and sorcery in their tiny paws.
Before Officer Judy Hopps arrived on the scene in Disney’s Zootopia (#43) there was Mrs. Brisby the field mouse (voiced by Elizabeth Hartman). She is a widowed, single mother who must defend her helpless son, Timothy, as he suffers from the symptoms of pneumonia. Why so urgent? The fuckin’ plow is coming! Mr. Ages the grumpy medicine mouse encourages Mrs. Brisby to visit The Great Owl (John Carradine), the source of all wisdom and danger in the woodland. He is, after all, an owl. “Owls eat mice,” Mrs. Brisby shyly points out to Mr. Ages. The Great Owl convinces Mrs. Brisby that her only soluton lies with the Rats of NIMH, a mystical community of rats who destroyed Mrs. Brisby’s late husband Jonathan’s life. Thus begins Mrs. Brisby’s brave journey into the Rose Bush to meet Nicodemus (Derek Jacobi) the wise mystic and rat who holds the key to the Brisby family’s safety.
Clearly inspired by Richard Adams’s Watership Down and Brian Jacques’s literary epic The Redwall Saga, Don Bluth’s The Secret of NIMH made me aware, as a boy, of the realities of evil and danger in our world while also putting the ability to “save the day” in the paws of tiny, familiar woodland critters. Don Bluth made me believe, and still does, that darkness and evil can be overcome by the hands and hearts of the small and ordinary.
22. Watership Down (1978)
Eight rabbits-Fiver, Hazel, Bigwig, Captain Holly, Blackberry, Silver, Pipkin, and Dandelion-into the unknown. This is not a pleasant adventure. Everywhere the rabbits end up, there is a life-threatening hazard. What makes their adventure all the more tangible is that Martin Rosen and his team never remove the rabbits from their natural habitat or experience. We recognize the rural scenery and the rabbits’ enemies; a cat, rabid rabbits, humans with cars, tractors, and guns, and trip wires. We also recognize the themes of politics, moral philosophy, theology, identity, and community. When the rabbits finally meet the creepy and enigmatic Cowslip (Denholm Elliott), he invites them to his warren of abundance where there are spies and deadly silence around every corner.
In the final scene of the film, Rosen captures an elderly Hazel’s encounter with the Black Rabbit of Death perfectly. We know that it is the inevitable ending. The mystery and power of death is, after all, the predominant theme in the film.
What makes Rosen’s account of Adams’s Watership Down all the more powerful and unsettling is that as we watch the film we can feel ourselves holding up a mirror. Hazel, Fiver, and friends might be in their natural habitat, but their natural habitat is ours as well, after all. The barriers between humanity and animal life are broken down, profoundly, by Rosen’s beautiful and startling vision. What is it that joins us together? The sobering inevitability of death.
21. The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
There are three song-and-dance entertainers in Paris, France. They are triplet sisters. They were at the height of their fame in the days of Fred Astaire and now they are older, senile, and living together in a rundown flat by the river. They eat frogs and they continue to relive their glory days through song and dance in their kitchen. They are full to over-flowing with joy. They are the Triplets of Belleville.
On the other side of France, there is an old, round grandma named Madame Souza who has delightful jowls, a lazy eye, and a wooden leg.and cares for her pudgy, depressed, mute grandson in an old, rural French chateau. She raises him on the evening TV specials of the Triplets of Belleville and buys him a big, loud, floppy dog to raise his spirits. Her silent grandson, Champion by name, soon tires of the dog and Souza buys him a tricycle, thus instilling in Champion a deep love of cycling for the rest of his life. As an adult the now skeletal, but still silent, Champion has qualified for the Tour de France and his faithful grandmother follows him around the cobbled city streets on her tricycle, blowing her whistle as she goes. She repairs his bicycle wheels. She massages the knots out of his back and calves. She feeds him disgusting green dishes. While racing in the Tour de France, Champion is kidnapped by Parisian thugs. Grandma Souza takes it upon herself to find and rescue her beloved grandson, with the help of their idiot dog. She gets lost in Paris and the senile Triplets of Belleville discover her in an alleyway.
The old world of French hot jazz and swing music is married to the world of French cycling in a delightful, and slightly grotesque and surreal, vision of a dream-like France. Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville is one of the most unique animated masterpieces we have. The characters are odd, colorful, and belong in a Tom Waits song. The soundtrack is delightful. See this film.
Joey Armstrong is a hospital chaplain from Western New York. He is also a playwright and amateur cartoonist. Follow him on Twitter @chaplainmystic and Medium, where he writes more reviews for film and television.
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