They've enthralled or terrified generations of kids, and now they're giant worldwide blockbusters. So what are the best animated features of all time? Using an obscure system of weights and measures, TIME's Richard Corliss has compiled and annotated the countdown, from No. 25 (Lady and the Tramp) to No. 1 (see for yourself). Are your favorites on the list? Let the great debate commence; we know it'll be animated.
In his first years as a producer of animated features, Walt Disney was the most ambitious man in Hollywood; Orson Welles’ dreams were pallid by comparison. Disney topped the breakthrough Snow White with the pinnacle of Pinocchio, then set about wedding classical music to sophisticated, sometimes abstract cartooning in the two-hour Fantasia. (“Gee,” Walt said about the movie’s “Rite of Spring” segment, “this’ll make Stravinsky!”) But between Fantasia and the 1942 Bambi — the last fully animated single-narrative feature the studio would make until the 1950 Cinderella — the team tossed out one “little” film that nobody was planning as a classic. Just 64 min. long and made quickly for under $1 million, Dumbo was filler. Also prime and primal Disney.
In director Ben Sharpsteen’s telling of a story by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl, a circus elephant named Jumbo Jr., is cruelly renamed Dumbo because of his big ears. Adhering to the by-now-standard Disney torture test for young viewers, Dumbo’s frantic mother is taken away to a “mad house” after causing a stampede. Alone in the world, the child pachyderm must take his friends where he finds them: in a sprightly mouse named Timothy and some wisecracking crows. In the tradition of children’s literature, Dumbo’s deformity proves an asset: he can fly!
Today’s moviegoers may take offense at the black stereotyping of the crow quartet, though their saucy humor is indistinguishable (in a G-rated way) from the antic characters in Barbershop or Friday. Dumbo, who never speaks, is a poignant silent clown in the tradition of Buster Keaton (the “Great Stone Face”) or Harry Langdon (the big baby), except that this big baby — and the simple, lovely fable he stars in — kept moviegoers from infant to senior smiling and sobbing for 70 years straight.
All right, this is cheating: including in this countdown a collection of shorts that (unlike Fantasia) were not made as part of an animated feature. Yet this feature-length medley of Chuck Jones cartoons from his postwar peak period at Warner Bros. has too much wit, melodrama and sheer delight not to be placed high on any list of animation achievements. Taken together, the 10 shorts compiled here — Hare-Way to the Stars, Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, Robin Hood Daffy, Duck Amuck, Bully for Bugs, Ali Baba Bunny, Rabbit Fire, For Scent-imental Reasons, Long-Haired Hare, What’s Opera, Doc? and Operation Rabbit — could serve as a child’s finest introduction to the raucous rapture of the animated film.
Warner Bros. shorts always shamed Disney’s in the creation of memorable anthropomorphs. Jones and writer Michael Maltese turned Porky Pig, once just a cute piglet, into a harassed middle-management type. Elmer Fudd was the chronic, choleric dupe, Sylvester J. Pussycat a feline of sputtering theatrical bombast. Bugs became the cartoon Cagney — urban, crafty, pugnacious — and then the unflappable underhare who wins every battle without ever mussing his aplomb. And Daffy … ah, Daffy! Here was modern man (well, modern mallard) in all his epic scheming and human frustration. He would debate with Bugs on the time of year (“Rabbit season!” “Duck season!”) before a shooting accident would require reconstructive surgery, as his quacking bill was suddenly on the back on his head. Pleading or wheedling or just staring ahead with a mutely eloquent resignation, Daffy embraced multitudes — multitudes of losers, us on our worst day. Multitudes of Chuck too: Jones later said that Bugs was the person he wished he could be and that Daffy was the person he probably was.
A staple of 35 years of Saturday matinees, the Jones cartoons — and those of his cartoon compadres Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng and Robert McKimson — rarely got official notice, even in the Academy Award category for Animated Short. (Only “For Scent-imental Reasons” copped an Oscar for Jones.) Yet these films were more than amusing, more than an excuse to escape reality. They were reality, transformed into art: brutally true, honorably honest, like Samuel Beckett with the fun up front. Jones was a genius of comic movement and dialogue and a genuine animator — he breathed soul into his creatures. Maybe children were his raptest audience, but his films were not merely kids’ stuff. As Jones often said, “We weren’t making them for kids, or for adults. We were making them for ourselves.” And, a grateful viewer has to say, for the best part of our selves.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
