# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 10, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-22-greatest-hand-drawn-animated-movies-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

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.

Tags: movies, animation, classics, all-time