The 22 Greatest Hand-Drawn Animated Movies of All Time

Cel-painted fairy tales sit beside hand-inked war stories and Irish folk myth. Some of these sold a billion tickets; others barely left the festival circuit.

1. 1
   Spirited Away

   Miyazaki's 2001 Ghibli masterpiece about a girl working in a bathhouse for spirits to free her parents.
2. 2
   Beauty and the Beast

   Disney's 1991 musical romance, the first animated film nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.
3. 3
   The Lion King

   Disney's 1994 Serengeti epic and the highest-grossing hand-drawn film ever made.
4. 4
   My Neighbor Totoro

   Miyazaki's 1988 Ghibli film about two sisters who meet a forest spirit while their mother is in hospital.
5. 5
   Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

   Disney's 1937 film, the first full-length cel-animated feature ever released.
6. 6
   Pinocchio

   Disney's 1940 adaptation of Collodi's tale, still a benchmark for hand-inked effects animation.
7. 7
   The Iron Giant

   Brad Bird's 1999 Cold War fable about a boy and a giant alien war machine who refuses to be a gun.
8. 8
   Akira

   Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 cyberpunk landmark set in Neo-Tokyo, drawn with over 160,000 cels.
9. 9
   Grave of the Fireflies

   Isao Takahata's 1988 Ghibli film about a brother and sister surviving the firebombing of Kobe.
10. 10
    The Prince of Egypt

    DreamWorks' 1998 Exodus epic, blending traditional animation with early digital crowd work.
11. 11
    Aladdin

    Disney's 1992 musical, remembered for Eric Goldberg's fluid, elastic animation of the Genie.
12. 12
    Fantasia

    Disney's 1940 experiment pairing eight classical pieces with abstract and narrative animation.
13. 13
    Princess Mononoke

    Miyazaki's 1997 Ghibli epic about the war between an ironworks town and the forest gods.
14. 14
    Howl's Moving Castle

    Miyazaki's 2004 Ghibli fantasy about a girl aged by a curse who takes shelter in a walking castle.
15. 15
    The Hunchback of Notre Dame

    Disney's 1996 Hugo adaptation, with cathedral crowd scenes among the studio's most ambitious.
16. 16
    Persepolis

    Marjane Satrapi's 2007 black-and-white memoir of growing up in Iran during and after the revolution.
17. 17
    The Triplets of Belleville

    Sylvain Chomet's 2003 near-wordless French comedy about a grandmother chasing kidnapped cyclists.
18. 18
    Watership Down

    The 1978 British adaptation of Richard Adams' novel about rabbits fleeing their doomed warren.
19. 19
    The Secret of Kells

    Cartoon Saloon's 2009 Irish debut about a boy illuminating a sacred manuscript as Vikings close in.
20. 20
    Song of the Sea

    Cartoon Saloon's 2014 film about a mute selkie girl and her brother crossing an Irish folklore landscape.
21. 21
    Ghost in the Shell

    Mamoru Oshii's 1995 cyberpunk anime about a cyborg officer chasing a hacker with no body.
22. 22
    The Little Mermaid

    Disney's 1989 musical that reopened the studio's hand-drawn golden age.

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