The Worst Animated Movie of All Time

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.
The Worst Animated Movie of All Time

© Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Animated films go back over a century and were popularized by Walt Disney. His breakthrough came with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937 and continued with “Fantasia” and “Pinocchio” two years later. Disney retains a premier producer of animated movies, largely because of its ownership of Pixar, which produced the Toy Story films and “Soul.” Disney is not alone in producing animated films. Virtually every major studio has some successes from the genre in its library.

Animated films are also vehicles for famous actors via voiceovers. Among the most well-known is Tom Hanks as Woody in the Toy Story movies.

24/7 Tempo has picked the worst animated movie, using an index composed of several measures from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), an online movie database owned by Amazon, and Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator. Across the board, the two common (and contradictory) critiques of animated films are that they will only appeal to young children or that they have too much adult humor. Apparently, there is a golden ratio of age-appropriate versus mature comedy-in-disguise that these feature films must achieve in order to have broad appeal.

To identify the worst animated movie ever made, 24/7 Tempo reviewed the 767 animated films with at least 10,000 reviews on IMDb. Only those with a runtime of greater than one hour that had a wide release in the United States were considered. To rank these movies, we created an index composed of each film’s IMDb rating, as well as its Audience Score and Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes. Data was collected in mid-March of 2021. Data on domestic box office came from The Numbers, an online movie database owned by consulting firm Nash Information Services. Cast information comes from IMDb.
[nativounit]
Notably, many of the worst animated movies are live-action/animation combinations, in which actors were filmed “interacting” with nonexistent characters who were only added to the film later — a challenge for any performer. That said, the presence in many of these movies of top-flight talent, whether in live-action form or merely as voices, is, unfortunately, no guarantee that it will be any good.

The worst animated movie is “The Emoji Movie.” Released in 2017, the film stars T.J. Miller, James Corden, Anna Faris and Maya Rudolph. Its domestic box office totaled $87.9 million.

This film that never should have been features floating emotive faces that live in a soulless cyber-city inside a cell phone. Even the concept deserved no more than a guffaw and a one-way ticket to the wastebasket. The talented voice cast could not save this film from itself.

Click here to read about all the worst animated movies of all time.
[wallst_email_signup]

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.

Continue Reading

Top Gaining Stocks

CBOE Vol: 1,568,143
PSKY Vol: 12,285,993
STX Vol: 7,378,346
ORCL Vol: 26,317,675
DDOG Vol: 6,247,779

Top Losing Stocks

LKQ
LKQ Vol: 4,367,433
CLX Vol: 13,260,523
SYK Vol: 4,519,455
MHK Vol: 1,859,865
AMGN Vol: 3,818,618