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.
Hundreds of years into the future, planet Earth has become a dump heap so huge that humans have fled into the stratosphere to be coddled by machines on a giant spaceship. The only signs of life back home are that unkillable bugger, the cockroach, and a trash cube with binocular eyes, forklift plates for arms and Caterpillar tracks to navigate the rough terrain. The thing is called a Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class — WALL•E — and its job is to clean up the mess of consumerism run amok. It can speak only in electronic grunts and sighs; when it is visited by a more advanced robot named EVE (for Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator), they communicate in one-word bursts.
The first half-hour of Andrew Stanton’s enthralling environmental parable is virtually wordless but has an almost symphonic aural richness, thanks to Ben Burtt’s intricate sound design. (He was also the voice of WALL•E.) In a movie that shows but doesn’t tell and whose leading characters are essentially mimes, Stanton clarifies for even the youngest viewer that machines have heart and soul. Less a trash collector than a trash connoisseur, WALL•E is programmed to be dedicated to his job. Yet he’s a lonely guy; he putters around the late, great planet Earth like a solitary child on an abandoned playground, or an oldster among his souvenirs. WALL•E’s special ache is his nostalgia for a life he never lived, for the intimate connection only humans enjoy. And when he finds EVE, he shows that machines can be, in the phrase from Blade Runner, more human than human.
All the major Pixar features, from Toy Story right through to Toy Story 3, have the means of astonishment. The company doesn’t make cute movies for kids; it tells universal stories through a graphic language so persuasive that children and adults respond with the same pleasure and awe. And WALL•E is the perfect culmination of John Lasseter’s first two-minute short, Luxo Jr., brought to its logical and thrilling romantic extension: toy meets girl.
For his follow-up to Snow White, Walt Disney developed a plotline that would anchor many animated features (Kung Fu Panda, Tangled, Happy Feet, The Little Mermaid, just to name four on this list): the coming-of-age film. Based on an 1883 story by Carlo Collodi and under the superb supervision of Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen, Pinocchio taught the lesson that a child is not human until he can feel loss and act with spontaneous generosity.
Whereas Snow White stuck to recognizably human forms — the script could almost have been shot as a live-action film — Pinocchio liberated the Disney animators. The movie boasts all manner of creatures: human (the woodcarver Gepetto), ethereal (the Blue Fairy), vulpine (J. Worthington Foxfellow), feline (Gideon) and bizarre hybrids. With freedom came challenges: finding a visual coherence for a landscape that included creatures as small as Jiminy Cricket and as large as Monstro the Whale (who was about the size of a three-story building).
A significant advance in narrative power and multiplane-camera technique over Snow White, the movie also taught moral lessons in the most useful way: by scaring the poop out of the little ones. If you tell a lie, your nose will grow; Pinocchio’s proboscis swells to Cyrano dimensions. If you run away from home, you could die; as the seductive kidnapper Stromboli tells the wooden boy, “When you grow too old, you will make good firewood.” Lured to Pleasure Island on the promise of making mischief away from adults’ censorious eyes, Pinocchio and his pals indulge in shooting pool, chugging alcohol and puffing on cigars. (Greatest antismoking PSA ever.) In fact, Pleasure Island is a concentration camp where bad boys are transformed into donkeys. In one of the scariest scenes in film history, Pinocchio’s pal Lampwick laughs at his friend, and a donkey’s hee-haw comes out. (Bizarrely, in the 1980s, Disney named a nighttime theme park in Florida after this awful prison.) Far from coddling his youngest customers, Walt Disney here portrayed childhood as an unrelenting series of nightmares.
The boldest of Disney’s horror homilies is also the most powerful demonstration of the ability of a medium supposedly aimed at kids to evoke persuasive motion and deep human emotion. The story of a puppet who wants to be a real live boy also serves as an allegory for the work of the Disney geniuses — and all the great animators whose works are included here — who start with pencil and ink, or pixels, or silhouettes, or plasticine figurines, and create vivid characters that live forever inside the small, enthralled child that is every moviegoer.
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
