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

Spirited Away

Miyazaki's 2001 Ghibli masterpiece about a girl working in a bathhouse for spirits to free her parents.

2

Beauty and the Beast

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

3

The Lion King

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

4

My Neighbor Totoro

Miyazaki's 1988 Ghibli film about two sisters who meet a forest spirit while their mother is in hospital.

5

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

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

6

Pinocchio

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

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

Akira

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

9

Grave of the Fireflies

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

10

The Prince of Egypt

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

11

Aladdin

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

12

Fantasia

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

13

Princess Mononoke

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

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

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

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

16

Persepolis

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

17

The Triplets of Belleville

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

18

Watership Down

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

19

The Secret of Kells

Cartoon Saloon's 2009 Irish debut about a boy illuminating a sacred manuscript as Vikings close in.

20

Song of the Sea

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

21

Ghost in the Shell

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

22

The Little Mermaid

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