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.
Stop-motion animation is exacting, exhausting work: building puppets, placing them on a miniature stage and moving them one frame at a time — tens of thousands of times. Harder still is bringing insouciant life to this arduous process. That’s what director Wes Anderson and animation director Mark Gustafson managed in this delightful version of the Roald Dahl children’s classic about a dapper, larcenous fox (voiced by George Clooney) who aims to pull off one last, impossible heist. The vibe of Fox and his wife (Meryl Streep) and rebellious son (Jason Schwartzman) is as comically tense as it is in families from earlier films by Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) and co-writer Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale). But the brood soon bonds, revealing its humor and humanity, its intrinsic and intoxicating foxiness.
Intended to take the songs of the Beatles into the medium of animation — and to cash in on the 1960s’ greatest and most profitable pop phenomenon — Yellow Submarine somehow found a sense of humor and sophistication worthy of the Fab Four. To translate the group’s groovy, borderline-psychedelic spirit to pictures, Canadian animator George Dunning assembled a writing team that included Erich Segal, soon to be famous as the author of Love Story, and Roger McGough, Britain’s foremost punster poet. They came up with a free-form, mostly underwater narrative that sent the lads (voiced by soundalikes) swimming backward and forward through the Sea of Time, getting lost in the Sea of Nothing and fighting a vacuum-cleaner beast in the Sea of Monsters, all while fighting off the evil Blue Meanies on their trip to Pepperland.
Some sequences were their own short films (Charles Jenkins created the poignant “Eleanor Rigby” segment), but the thing held together thanks to the hallucinatory opulence of Heinz Edelmann’s design. A G-rated head trip, the movie appealed to kids, their stoned older siblings and their hip parents. As A Hard Day’s Night and Help! had invigorated live-action film a few years before, so Yellow Submarine proved that the Disney style wasn’t the only way for animated features, and the film’s financial success made possible rougher fantasias such as Fantastic Planet (1973) and Heavy Metal (1981). Could the movie, so indelibly a part of its era, speak to ours? Robert Zemeckis thought so: he planned a 3-D version for release in 2012. But after the box-office failure of his animated Mars Needs Moms, his sponsoring studio — Disney — killed the project.
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
