These Are The Greatest Animated Movies Of All Time

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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These Are The Greatest Animated Movies Of All Time

© Courtesy of Buena Vista Pictures

Animated films got their beginning in the early 20th Century. They fully came into their own with the creation of Mickey Mouse by Walt Disney. Mickey Mouse’s first film was “Plane Crazy,” released in 1928. Walt Disney Studios remained an animation powerhouse well into the 1940s with widely distributed and highly awarded films led by “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), “Pinocchio” (1940), “Fantasia” (1940), and Bambi (1942). It still releases among the most successful and awarded animated films today.

It took decades before animated movies took the place where they were recognized for quality production, creativity, and acting the way the balance of the industry had been. The first Academy Award for “Best Animated Feature” was not given until 2002 for “Shrek” which had voice-overs from movie stars Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, and Cameron Diaz.

Animated films have also been a major success at the box office since the early days. Over 25 animated movies have had domestic box office totals of over $250 million. Disney has seven of the top eight, according to Box Office Mojo–“Incredibles 2” (2018) at $608,581,744, “The Lion King” (2019) at $543,638,043, “Finding Dory” (2016) at $486,295,561,  “Frozen II” (2019) at $477,373,578,  “Shrek 2” (2014) at $441,226,247, “Toy Story 4” (2019) at $434,038,008, “Toy Story 3” (2010) at $415,004,880 , and “Frozen” (2013) at $400,738,009. Adjusted for inflation, some of the earlier Disney movies would likely make the list.

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Among the definitive polls on “greatest films” are those done by the American Academy of Film. It not only keeps its list of the “100 Greatest American Films of All Time” (voted on by over 1,500 AFI members) but also keeps films by genre. Among these is “10 Greatest Animated Films”.

The AFI’s selections are in order top to bottom: 1) “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), 2) “Pinnochio” (1940), 3) “Bambi” (1942), 4) “The Lion King” (1994),  5) “Fantasia” (1942), 6) “Toy Story” (1995), 7) “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), 8) “Shrek” (2011), 9) “Cinderella”, (1950), and 10) “Finding Nemo” (2003).

Notably, five of these were made by Disney Studios while Walt Disney was still alive–“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, “Pinnochio”, “Bambi”, “Fantasia”, and “Cinderella”. And, the most recent one, “Finding Nemo”, was also made by Walt Disney Studios. The man, and studio, that started with Mickey Mouse almost a century ago, still dominated the industry.

Click here to read These Are The 55 Best Movies Ever Made

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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