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Animation has always had a weird unfairness around it. The loudest films become childhood monuments, while quieter, stranger, smaller animated movies get treated like side doors in the medium, even when they are doing things live-action could never touch with the same delicacy.
The films below deserve that bigger conversation. Some are funny in ways that feel completely unhinged. Some are soft enough to break you. Some use silence, folklore, paint, paper, clay, or stop-motion chaos to say things about grief, friendship, class, memory, faith, and growing up that feel almost too precise for their running times. And unlike the stereotypical belief, they’re not just for kids. Lock in if you’re ready.
10
‘The Illusionist’ (2010)
There is a special sadness in watching an artist realize the world has moved on without making a scene about it. The old magician (Jean-Claude Donda) at the center of The Illusionist travels through half-empty venues, fading variety halls, and small rooms where his act no longer has the same shine. Then he meets Alice (Eilidh Rankin), a young woman in a remote Scottish village who believes in his magic with the kind of innocence he cannot bring himself to crush.
Their tender bond gets built from misunderstandings, small gifts, quiet routines, and the ache of someone giving more than he can afford. Although it’s an animated film, it barely needs dialogue because the body language says everything: his tired posture, her delighted curiosity, the lonely hotels, the Edinburgh streets, the performers around him losing ground to a louder modern world. That’s brilliant. The film’s beauty sits in that painful space between illusion and kindness. He cannot give Alice magic forever, but for a little while, he lets her believe life can still surprise her gently.
9
‘A Town Called Panic’ (2009)
A Town Called Panic begins with Cowboy (Max Briquenet), Indian (Bruce Ellison), and Horse (David Ricci), and Cowboy and Indian want to surprise their roommate Horse for his birthday, then accidentally order an absurd number of bricks, destroy the house, and unleash a chain of nonsense that keeps getting bigger, faster, and more ridiculous. The characters are literal plastic toys, and the film treats that limitation like rocket fuel.
The joy comes from how seriously everyone takes the stupidest possible events. Horse is the only responsible adult in a world where responsibility has no chance. The brick disaster, the underwater thieves, the yelling, the random trips, the school piano lessons, the constant escalation, it all has the rhythm of imagination before logic arrives to ruin it. Plenty of animated comedies try to be chaotic. This one feels genuinely free. It deserves masterpiece talk because its craft is hidden inside the madness. Every tiny movement, every cheap-looking figure, every impossible detour adds to the feeling that animation can be pure play without becoming empty.
8
‘The Red Turtle’ (2016)
In The Red Turtle, a man washes onto an island, and the movie has the confidence to let silence do the talking. What follows is a man who tries to escape on rafts, but a giant red turtle keeps stopping him, and what begins as survival turns into something stranger, sadder, and more mythic. There are no speeches to explain what the island means, who the turtle is, or why this life is unfolding the way it does. The film trusts the viewer to feel it.
That trust is exactly why it stays with you. The man’s anger at the turtle, the transformation into a woman, the child growing up between sea and shore, the storms, the crabs, the bamboo, the wide empty horizon, all of it plays like a whole life remembered through images. It is about companionship, nature, parenthood, death, and the way time keeps moving even when nobody narrates it for us. In this film the animation is stripped down to breath and movement and that feels simple until you realize how much it has quietly carried.
7
‘The Breadwinner’ (2017)
The Breadwinner is about an Afghan girl, Parvana (Saara Chaudry) living under Taliban rule, and when her father is arrested, her family loses the one man who can legally move through public spaces for them. Parvana cuts her hair, dresses as a boy, and steps into a city where every errand carries danger. The story hurts because her courage comes before childhood has had any fair chance to end.
The movie balances real-world fear with storytelling in a way that gives Parvana inner strength without turning her situation into easy inspiration. Her tale about a boy facing the Elephant King runs alongside the danger of Kabul, and those handmade storybook sequences help her process fear she cannot safely say out loud. The bread market, the prison attempts, the family’s hunger, the constant threat from armed men, all of it keeps the stakes painfully close. This film deserves far more attention because it uses animation to protect the tenderness of a child’s perspective while refusing to hide the brutality around her.
6
‘The Secret of Kells’ (2009)
You can feel the pages glowing before you even understand the full danger outside the abbey walls. Brendan (Evan McGuire) is a young boy living in the Abbey of Kells under the strict protection of his uncle, Abbot Cellach (Brendan Gleeson), who is obsessed with building walls against Viking attacks. Then Brother Aidan (Mick Lally) arrives with an unfinished illuminated manuscript, and Brendan’s world opens toward art, forest magic, and a kind of bravery his uncle cannot measure with stone.
The film looks like a medieval manuscript learning how to breathe. Sharp patterns, spirals, flat shapes, glowing colors, and wild forest lines make every frame feel handmade with purpose. Aisling (Christen Mooney), the forest spirit Brendan meets, brings mischief and ancient sadness into the story, while the threat of Crom Cruach gives the beauty a darker pulse. What makes the movie so special is how it treats art as survival. The book in the story is memory, faith, imagination, and resistance carried through a world that keeps trying to burn itself down.
5
‘The Painting’ (2011)
The Painting follows the Alldunns, fully painted and privileged, who treat the Halfies and Sketchies like lesser beings because some characters were left incomplete by the Painter (JB Blanc). Lola (Kamali Minter), Ramo, and Plume leave their painted world to search for the artist who abandoned them, and that search turns the movie into a playful, gorgeous argument about art, hierarchy, and identity.
The film keeps finding new visual pleasures without losing the ache underneath. Characters move through canvases, studios, landscapes, and unfinished spaces where color itself becomes social status. A half-painted face can carry shame. A sketch line can become a prison. The adventure is charming, but the sharpness comes from how easily beauty becomes a class system when people start worshipping completion. It is such an underrated animated gem because it understands creation from the inside. Every artist leaves marks, gaps, and accidents behind, and this movie imagines the lives that might exist inside those gaps.
4
‘The Tale of the Princess Kaguya’ (2013)
It is almost painful how alive this movie feels in its pencil lines. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya begins when a bamboo cutter, Taketori no Okina (James Caan) finds a tiny girl inside a glowing stalk and raises her with his wife in the countryside, where she grows quickly, runs through fields, laughs with village children, and seems happiest when life is messy and free. Then wealth and status pull her toward court life, and the girl who once belonged to wind, dirt, and sunlight gets dressed into a role that slowly suffocates her.
The distinct animation makes that emotional loss visible. When Kaguya runs in distress, the lines themselves seem to break open with her. When suitors treat her like a prize, the beauty of the palace starts feeling like a cage. Her parents love her, yet their dream of giving her a noble life becomes part of the pressure that separates her from herself. The film is devastating because it understands how love can accidentally become control. It looks delicate, but its sadness is enormous.
3
‘Ernest & Celestine’ (2012)
The sweetest thing about this movie is how stubbornly it believes friendship can embarrass an entire society. Ernest (Lambert Wilson) is a hungry bear living badly on the margins of the bear world, and Celestine (Pauline Brunner) is a young mouse being trained in an underground society where mice are taught to fear bears and collect their teeth. They are supposed to be enemies by nature, by law, by bedtime story, by everything their worlds have repeated at them.
Then they meet, help each other, and become a pair so instantly lovable that the whole system around them starts looking ridiculous. Ernest’s grumpy warmth and Celestine’s fierce little imagination turn the movie into a soft rebellion against inherited fear. The watercolor style gives every street, shop, cellar, and snowy escape a storybook looseness that feels cozy without becoming cute in a shallow way. The courtroom scenes bring the prejudice into the open, but the film never gets heavy-handed. It simply lets one bear and one mouse prove that entire cultures can be wrong about who deserves trust.
2
‘Mary and Max’ (2009)
This one can destroy you with a letter. Mary and Max follows Mary Daisy Dinkle (Bethany Whitmore), a lonely Australian girl with a birthmark, distracted parents, and no real friends, so she randomly writes to Max Jerry Horowitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a middle-aged Jewish man in New York who lives with anxiety, routine, chocolate hot dogs, and Asperger syndrome. Their friendship grows through letters, drawings, questions, misunderstandings, forgiveness, and long stretches of life that neither of them knows how to handle alone. And this one follows clay animation which gives the film’s sadness a strange softness.
Mary’s brown Australian world and Max’s gray New York world both feel heavy, but every object has a handmade vulnerability to it. The film talks about mental health, loneliness, shame, food, bodies, bullying, obsession, and friendship with a directness that never feels fake. Mary and Max hurt each other at times because they are human, limited, and scared, which makes their bond even more precious. This is the kind of animated movie people casually overlook, then carry forever once they actually see it.
1
‘Song of the Sea’ (2014)
Some animated films feel like bedtime stories. Song of the Sea feels like a bedtime story told by someone who is also trying to heal a family wound. Ben (David Rawle) is a young boy living in a lighthouse with his father Conor (Brendan Gleeson) and little sister Saoirse (Lucy O’Connell) after their mother Bronagh disappears. He resents Saoirse because he connects her birth with that loss, and the story slowly reveals that she is a selkie whose voice is tied to old magic fading from the world.
The film earns the top spot because every piece of its beauty has emotional purpose. The Irish folklore, the glowing seals, the owl witch Macha (Fionnula Flanagan), the stone fairies, the city streets, and the circular designs all lead back to grief that has been locked away instead of felt. Ben’s anger softens as he learns what Saoirse is carrying, and Conor’s sadness stops feeling like background mood once you understand what he lost. The songs, colors, and myths are gorgeous, but the real power is family finally making room for pain without letting it drown them. This is an animated masterpiece hiding in plain sight.
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https://collider.com/forgotten-animated-movies-almost-perfect/
Safwan Azeem
Almontather Rassoul
