“Animation is cinema.” — Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro

Over the past three decades of cinema, few films have captured my imagination as much, or as consistently, as each year’s most notable animated features. Those who make no distinction between animated movies and “kids’ movies” might call it a symptom of my unwillingness to leave my childhood behind, and I can’t say they’re altogether wrong. (Except when it comes to their belief that animation is “just for kids.” In that regard they are 100% wrong.) But I claim it has more to do with the quality of the films themselves. These works combine innovation, intelligence, and empathy, three characteristics I appreciate in any form of cinema but which aren’t frequently found together in live-action films, especially the so-called “Oscar bait” released each last quarter of the year.

It’s no accident that the same people who dismiss all animation as entertainment for children — a way of thinking tragically on display at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony, when the presenters of the Best Animated Feature Oscar joked about kids forcing their parents to watch animated movies “over and over and over” when the parents would rather be watching something else — also tend to sneer at film genres like science fiction, fantasy, and musicals; afflicted with what C. S. Lewis referred to as a “childish” desire to appear very grown up, they feel that the colder and edgier a film is, the more insightful, and therefore valuable, it must be. I would respectfully refer them to the recent release Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which has been doing some strong box office. (I love when movies are popular because they deserve to be.) This movie, a visually striking masterpiece, tells a story more complex and thought-provoking than many live-action action-adventure films, placing its likable protagonists in situations where it’s next to impossible to do the right thing or even to figure out what that “right thing” is. And in this movie, the “right thing” could be so many things. In fact, it ends on a cliffhanger, so we don’t really know what that “right thing” is! But I digress.

Although mature tweens and teens would find much to enjoy — the characters are easy to relate to, and the action sequences are spectacular — Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is not a “movie for children.” It’s also the likely front-runner in next year’s race for Best Animated Feature, unless Ruby Gilman: Teenage Kraken and Wish manage to surprise us. But will it garner the adapted screenplay nomination it deserves?

With this movie fresh in my mind, I’ve chosen to start a series ranking twenty-one of the twenty-two Best Animated Feature winners, from Least Favorite to Most. (I will not be ranking 2017’s Coco, as I have yet to see it.)

21. Happy Feet (2006)

This was a weak year for animated features, with three rather weak, mid-tier nominees, none of which might have managed to snag a nomination in a stronger year like 2009 or 2022. I do find certain aspects of Pixar’s Cars to be charming, particularly Paul Newman’s wise, warm turn as retired race car Doc Hudson, but I agree with the general consensus that it’s not among the studio’s top-notch efforts. Still, even Cars would have been a more deserving winner than the overlong and convoluted mess that is Happy Feet. I barely recall a thing about it, except the trouble I had staying interested in it past the halfway point and its adherence to the “Smurfette Principle” by having only one female character of any significance, whom it keeps on the sidelines for most of the run time. None of the characters made the slightest mark.

20. Rango (2011)

Like Happy Feet, this movie suffers from a meandering plot, and again, I found myself getting restless around the middle of its run time. I will acknowledge some of the character work is impressive, and some of its characters, namely Rango himself and his antagonist Rattlesnake Jake, made sort of an impact, certainly more than anyone in Happy Feet. But how a movie this flawed somehow managed to triumph over Dreamworks’ gorgeous, funny, fast-paced, moving, and always engaging Kung Fu Panda 2 is beyond my power to understand.

19. Soul (2020)

Maybe I haven’t been completely fair to this one, since I saw it after I had already fallen head over heels in love with the exquisite feminist animated fantasy Wolfwalkers, and nothing was going to change my mind that Cartoon Saloon’s film deserved Best Animated Feature. I nonetheless did my best to judge Pixar’s Soul on its own merits, and I found it wanting. While I do appreciate its creative depiction of the Afterlife, and I empathize with the movie’s flawed protagonist, a musician who dies in a pointless accident but who refuses to really, you know, die until he has played one magical gig, I took a hearty dislike to the secondary lead, an unborn soul dubbed “22” who refuses to be born because “Earth is boring.” Even after she underwent some character growth, I could not shake my dislike. This may have as much to do with me as with the character, since in real life I have next to no patience with blase’, unimaginative types whose favorite word is “meh” and who flatly refuse to be inspired by anything. Teachers’ Occupational Hazard, I suppose. Soul has its virtues, but it was not for me. (Also, would somebody please inform Disney/Pixar that calico cats are female? More on this when the time comes to talk about Big Hero 6.)

18. Brave (2012)

Pixar, who had previously invited us into the lives of toys, bugs, monsters, fish, and superheroes, finally gives us a movie with a female protagonist, and what do we get? A human princess. (Yawn!) One could, if one wished, read this as a commentary on how limited screenwriters’ imaginations still tend to be where female characters are concerned; while males can be absolutely anything, be it animal or inanimate, if a female is to lead the narrative she must be either human or, like Joy, Sadness, and Disgust in 2015’s Inside Out, humanoid. Still, this wouldn’t matter if the movie were stronger. When I first saw Brave, I found it charming, pleased with the grandeur of its medieval Scotland setting and its focus on a mother/daughter relationship, something we simply hadn’t seen in animated cinema before this movie happened. But it failed to hold up on re-watch. It disappoints me to see the heroine Merida being groomed for marriage rather than for rule, a mistake that 2016’s superior Moana would correct; I would find it much easier to see mother Elinor’s side of things if she were urging Merida toward the responsibility of government than toward a loveless political union. Plus, it chooses to inflict on us Merida’s monstrous triplet brothers, the three most annoying characters I’ve ever seen in a Pixar film (and remember, Pixar also gave us Tow Mater in the Cars franchise). While the characters in Happy Feet just bored me, these three I actively dislike. The bit where they, transformed into bear cubs, try to retrieve a key that a waiting woman has dropped down her bodice? Wrong on every level.

To Be Continued