Anime Movies, Ranked

Won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and was the first hand-drawn, non-English film to do so; long the highest-grossing film in Japanese history.

Its 160,000-cel animation and pre-scored dialogue set a new technical benchmark and it helped open Western markets to adult anime.

Takahata's WWII drama about two orphaned siblings is routinely cited by critics like Roger Ebert as one of the greatest war films ever made.

Grossed over $380 million worldwide and became the highest-grossing anime film at the time, cementing Shinkai as a global draw.

Miyazaki's epic ecological fable was Japan's highest-grossing film until Titanic and marked Ghibli's international breakthrough via Miramax.

Kon's psychological thriller pioneered a reality-blurring editing style that later influenced Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan.

Its cyberpunk vision of networked consciousness directly inspired The Matrix, whose creators screened it as a reference for producers.

Naoko Yamada's drama about bullying and deafness earned wide acclaim and won Best Animation of the Year at the Japan Movie Critics Awards.

Miyazaki's return from retirement won the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature, making him, at 83, the oldest director to win the Oscar in the category.

Became the highest-grossing film ever in Japan and, on release, the highest-grossing anime film worldwide, though it functions as a sequel to the TV series.

Took seven years and roughly 100,000 hand-drawn frames to complete, delivering some of the most kinetic 2D racing animation ever produced.

Shinkai's follow-up to Your Name was Japan's official Oscar submission and grossed over $190 million worldwide.

Hosoda's breakout won the Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year and launched him as a major post-Ghibli director.

A landmark of adult action anime whose fluid, violent swordplay made it a staple of 1990s Western anime home-video culture.

A commercial hit grossing over $190 million, but it serves as a prequel that leans on familiarity with the franchise rather than standing alone.

Praised for its frenetic fight animation, but its plot is a fan-service retcon of a non-canon villain aimed squarely at existing fans.

A massive box-office earner driven by franchise mania, but its heavily rewritten English dub and thin plot drew critical panning.

Notorious for compressing a sprawling manga into an incoherent film, better remembered for gore than coherent storytelling.

Widely ranked among the worst anime ever made, it carries one of the lowest scores on MyAnimeList for its broken animation and nonsensical plot.