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.
The string of Pixar hits and the mammoth worldwide gross for DreamWorks’ Shrek gave movie studios the signal to dump hand-drawn 2-D animation for the shinier, more popular CGI. Apparently Sylvain Chomet didn’t get the news. The French comic-strip artist spent five years making The Triplets of Belleville (also known as Belleville Rendez-vous), about an old woman who raises her grandson to be a Tour de France champion. There’s a dog, some bike-napping mafiosi and three old chanteuses whose diet consists entirely of frogs they catch by tossing hand grenades into a nearby stream. Vous guessed it by now: Triplets is terrific.
Chomet, who seven years later made the Jacques Tati–inspired The Illusionist — and who, for Triplets, did use computer animation for the film’s cars, boats and trains — has a canny design eye to match his narrative wit. The old woman is stocky and clubfooted, a compact metaphor for stubborn dedication; her grandson is so spindly, he could ride Giacometti’s chariot; Bruno the dog has more personality than 101 dalmatians. The movie isn’t aimed at kids, but they will find plenty to beguile them. And don’t worry that the film is French; it has hardly any dialogue. Doesn’t need it. There’s eloquence enough in the movie’s gnarly imagery and Chomet’s understanding of the human impulse not just to survive but also to save others.
One sequence, toward the beginning of Pete Docter’s old-man-and-a-kid romance, made everyone fall for Up. In the 1930s, Carl, a preteen adventurer (if only in his mind), hopes one day to visit Paradise Falls in remote South America; then he meets a girl named Ellie, whose daring matches his dreams, and it’s love at first sight. A tender montage synopsizes a half-century of their life together: the wedding, the fixing up of their home, the quiet walks, their respective jobs at the local zoo (her tending the animals, he selling balloons), their eager preparations for a child they later learn they can’t have, their need to defer the big trip to Paradise Falls to pay for home improvements, then her slowing pace and death. This series of vignettes is played without dialogue and underscored by Michael Giacchino’s wistful waltz. It’s the sweetest, saddest 4½ min. you’ll ever see in a movie.
With the love of his life gone, widower Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) might as well be dead. His home is really a mausoleum, and he is both caretaker and corpse. We never heard the mature Carl say a word to Ellie while she was alive, but now he talks nonstop to his absent darling. She’d understand his bitterness; she might even forgive it. And she’d surely approve of his decision to fly to Paradise Falls — in his own house, to which he has attached 20,000 helium-filled balloons. What he doesn’t expect is that he will have company: a Wilderness Ranger named Russell, who’s about the same age Carl was when he met Ellie.
Up revels in a minimum of dialogue, deft comic underplaying and a style the Pixar people call “simplexity” — a character design that stresses circles and cubes. Carl looks like a trash-compacted Spencer Tracy in his later years; Ellie is curvy; and the round Russell might be another balloon. The visual scheme also goes for contrasts: Carl’s home has a muted, almost funereal palette, while the South American flora and fauna form a ravishing fiesta of color. From the fairly radical notion of a family feature about a mean old man who literally and figuratively learns to let go, Docter and co-director and co-writer Bob Peterson sent Carl and the audience on a journey in two new directions: penetratingly inward and exaltedly up.
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
