The Best Animated Movies Not Made by Disney or Pixar

Hayao Miyazaki's bathhouse picture took the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th ceremony, the first hand-drawn non-English-language film to manage it, and it shared the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2002. The stretch that stays with people is the quietest: a train ride across flooded tracks, water up to the rails, nobody speaking, a small girl sitting still while the light goes grey. Ghibli made it; Disney only sold tickets.

Isao Takahata adapted Akiyuki Nosaka's 1967 semi-autobiographical short story, and Japanese audiences got it on 16 April 1988 as a double feature with My Neighbor Totoro, a booking so misjudged it has become part of the film's legend. What breaks you is domestic and small: a fruit-drop tin shaken for the last crumbs, then filled with water so there is something sweet left to drink. Calling it an anti-war film undersells it; the war is only the weather.

Katsuhiro Otomo directed from his own 1982 manga while he was still writing it, spent more than 160,000 cels, and had the dialogue recorded before animation so the lip movements could be drawn to match, a first for Japanese animation. Kaneda's red bike laying itself flat into a neon-lit power slide is the shot three decades of action animation went on copying, and Tokyo Movie Shinsha did it with paint on acetate.

Brad Bird's feature directorial debut took $31.7 million worldwide against a $50 million budget, a flop Warner Bros. earned by barely marketing it. Rising to meet the missile, the giant decides what he is going to be and says the name out loud; the whole hour before exists so that one word lands. Warner Bros. Feature Animation buried the film on release, and video, cable and two decades of argument dug it back up.

Sony Pictures Animation won Best Animated Feature at the 91st Academy Awards with a film that broke the smoothness rule on purpose: Miles is animated on twos, twelve drawings a second, while Peter runs at twenty-four, so the kid visibly moves like someone who has not learned yet. The leap of faith pays it off — he steps off a skyscraper, the image inverts, and falling reads as flight.

Plasticine took Best Animated Feature at the 78th Academy Awards, which stings a little given that shortly after release a fire at Aardman's warehouse destroyed thirty years of past work along with this production's own models and sets. Bun-Vac 6000 sucking rabbits out of the vegetable patch and depositing them dazed in a glass drum is the sight gag that repays every hour of stop-motion labour.

Satoshi Kon's first film as a director, animated at Madhouse, and it still ambushes people who turn up expecting cartoons. Reality comes apart by edit rather than by effect: a bathtub scream, cut so you cannot place which version of the day you are watching, and the film never slows down to explain itself. Requiem for a Dream reproduces some of its angles, which tells you who was paying attention.

Laika's first feature, directed by Henry Selick, ran twenty-eight identical puppets of its heroine, each about three to four months of work for roughly ten people, plus a face-replacement rig offering 207,336 combinations. All that machinery exists to sell one moment — the Other Mother setting out a needle, black thread and two buttons on the table, then asking politely. Children's films are not supposed to go there.

Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud co-directed her autobiographical graphic novel as roughly 1,200 hand-drawn shots in flat black and white — the team tried pen tablets early on, hated the loss of definition and went back to paper and ink — then co-won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007 alongside Silent Light. Between an execution and an exile sits a completely straight-faced Eye of the Tiger aerobics montage, and the whiplash is the argument.

Winning the first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 74th ceremony was the smaller trick; competing for the Palme d'Or at Cannes the same year was the odd one, the first animated film in main competition since 1980. Jeffrey Katzenberg's revenge on his old employer opens with a fairy-tale book page torn out for use in an outhouse, and DreamWorks lived off that gesture for a decade.

Kilkenny's Cartoon Saloon drew the town and the forest in two incompatible styles on purpose — the walled town in thick angular seventeenth-century woodcut lines, the woods in loose curving sketchwork — and earned a Best Animated Feature nomination at the 93rd Academy Awards. Everything opens up during the first run through the forest in wolf vision, where scent arrives as white contour lines. Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart directed, by hand.

Gints Zilbalodis built it in Blender, free open-source software, and it beat every major studio to Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards, the first Latvian production ever to win one, off a worldwide gross of about $30.8 million. There is no dialogue anywhere in it. Watch the cat's first swim, all panic and then sudden competence, and notice how much character arrives with no face doing any acting.

DreamWorks Animation's first traditionally animated feature became the first animated feature from outside Disney and Pixar to win an Academy Award, once When You Believe took Best Original Song at the 71st ceremony; Aardman had already won three times, but for shorts. Katzenberg wanted scale and got it in the parting of the Red Sea, where lightning cracks overhead and a whale drifts past inside the standing wall of water. The songs are uneven; that sequence is not.

Ari Folman animated his own recorded interviews about the 1982 Lebanon war and became the first director to land an animated film a Best Foreign Language Film nomination at the Academy Awards; it won that category at the Golden Globes in 2009. Three soldiers rise naked out of a black sea while flares drift over Beirut, and the image keeps returning until you grasp that a memory is being repaired rather than recalled.

René Laloux adapted Stefan Wul's 1957 novel Oms en série into cut-paper animation made at the Jiří Trnka Studio in Prague, and Cannes handed it a special jury prize in 1973. Blue giants keep tiny humans as pets; a Draag child dangles one by its collar out of boredom, then loses interest. Nothing else in animation moves like this, stiff and sliding and deliberately unlovely, and album sleeves have been raiding it ever since.

Britain rated it U on release and only raised that to PG in August 2022, after decades of complaints, which is the funniest paperwork in animation. Martin Rosen took over directing from John Hubley and adapted Richard Adams' 1972 novel without softening anything: Fiver's vision of the field filling with blood arrives early and sets the terms. Art Garfunkel's Bright Eyes, written by Mike Batt, went to number one.