3. Akira (1988)

Condensing thousands of pages of Katsuhiro Otomo’s legendary dystopian manga into a single two hour film was no easy task. But what emerged was fast, gruesome, action-packed tale that pushed cyberpunk to the forefront of modern culture and began to see anime taken seriously in the genre in the West. This was no kid fare along the lines of Voltron or Speed Racer. No, this near-future tale showed us a world all too familiar with its warring street gangs, brutally repressive police, and military conspiracies.

But when a tormented victim of all these forces emerges with limitless psychic power will it finally elevate mankind above all this? Or is it just the latest plummet in a broken society’s death spiral?

2. Anomalisa (2015)

Charlie Kaufman, best known for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is responsible for this interesting and unusual tale. Anomalisa didn’t make much of a splash during its release in 2015, but the film has slowly been drawing the attention it deserves ever since. David Thewliss voices a British motivational speaker who, during his travels, comes across a woman played by Jennifer Jason Leigh that he can’t quite get out of his head.

What follows is a sublime commentary about modern life and the difficulty it creates in finding connection with others, all delivered masterfully by the leads with Kaufman’s charmingly awkward and longing-laced dialogue.

It is another work that merges humor and sorrow into an unexpectedly complete product and proves yet again that animation can be so much more than just zany cartoon antics.

1. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Fantastic Mr. Fox was the first book that film director Wes Anderson can recall owning as a child. In 2009 he got the chance to turn his beloved book into a stop motion-style animated epic. George Clooney portrays the titular fox: once a notorious robber now grown restless with his sedentary home life.

Mr. Fox tries to recapture the spark his life once held by raiding the farms for food, but when the farmers retaliate Mr. Fox and his animal friends find themselves in a situation far more serious than they expected.

Roald Dahl’s children’s tales are notoriously dark, but Anderson mines Mr. Fox for its best elements and tells the story in a whole new way: something that the best animated films always do.

So there you have it – our top 15 favorite animated films of all-time. Disagree? Tell us what you would have replaced in our list and what your favorites are in the comment section below.