Now we’ve arrived at the Top Five! My five favorite films ever to win Best Animated Feature — not necessarily the “best” from an objective stance, but the ones that stand highest in my heart.

5. Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

Of all the Western companies that produce animated features, Aardman Films have perhaps the most likable output of all. Even their weakest films are almost impossible to dislike. 2005’s Best Animated Feature winner isn’t my favorite Aardman work — that would be Chicken Run, which was made and released before the category was created — but it’s still an inspiring combination of humor, horror, and heart, as our heroes, cheese-loving human Wallace and his genius dog Gromit (who expresses himself only with his eyes), try to track down and neutralize a massive monster rabbit that’s terrorizing their village right before a big vegetable festival. I may have been careless about spoilers in my previous posts, but in this case I’m not going to spoil the identity of the Were-Rabbit, because this delightful film isn’t as widely-known and widely-viewed as it deserves to be, despite its Oscar win. Plus, two of Wallace & Gromit’s previous short films also won deserved Oscars. Track this one down and watch it if you haven’t already. If you’re a fan of British humor, as I definitely am, you’ll find it irresistible.

4. Zootopia (2016)

2016 was another of those years with multiple over-the-top strong contenders for the Oscar; I would have been very happy to see a three-way tie between this film, Moana, and Laika’s tragically underrated Kubo and the Two Strings, all splendid films deserving of victory. But this movie ranks this highly on my Favorite Winners list for several reasons. First, the heroine, rabbit police officer Judy Hopps (an in-joke to “21 Jump Street”), is a smart, resourceful, idealistic, yet flawed character, one of the most complex female leads we’ve seen from Disney. Second, the emphasis is not on Judy finding love but on her learning to do her job well, making this movie one of only two Best “Picture” winners (the other being 1991’s Silence of the Lambs) to center on a female lead’s work rather than her relationships. Third, the cross-gender (and cross-species) friendship between Judy and fox Nick Wilde is a treat, as both characters learn and grow as they come to value one another. Fourth, the movie is a gorgeous masterpiece of world-building, the titular metropolis being both elaborately designed and delightfully “lived in.” A joy all around. And oh, yeah: when Mister Big threatens to “ice” somebody, take him seriously!

3. WALL-E (2008)

As with all the best Pixar films, 2008’s winner is stunning to look at, from the opening sequence in the wasteland Earth has become due to humanity’s maxing out its resources, to the scenes that take place on the vast, sterile Axiom spaceship, yet at the heart of the creative and thought-provoking world lies a story of a relationship, in this case the romance between outmoded but adorable trash compactor WALL-E and sleek, state-of-the-art vegetation evaluator EVE. WALL-E is our winsome protagonist, the commoner falling in love with the princess and pursuing her to her palace in space. Wherever he goes, change follows. He brings EVE into the shelter where he keeps all the artifacts he’s saved from the trash cubes, and from this she learns about joy. He bumps into two of the humans aboard the Axiom, John and Mary, thus knocking them out of their motorized existence and enabling them actually to see the world around them, and each other. He bumps into the captain of the Axiom and gets soil on the man’s hands; the captain has never seen or touched soil and has no idea what it is, so he feeds it into a machine to be identified, and thus begins his education about the Earth that he and all his passengers have forgotten. Yet WALL-E himself never changes, never even realizing the changes he inspires in those around him. EVE, by contrast, has a growth arc, making her much more than a simple love interest; she learns to see beyond her “directive” and live, and at the climax she’s as much a hero as WALL-E himself. A beautiful film.

2. The Incredibles (2004)

2004’s winner is the first good (strong emphasis on good) movie to feature a female superhero — two of them, actually — so of course it finds a home near the top of my favorites list. But groundbreaking representation aside, this movie showcases all the strengths of Pixar’s Golden Age. We have a multi-generational ensemble protagonist, directly flying in the face of the lie that animated films are strictly “children’s entertainment.” We have complex characters who evolve through their experience, from insurance adjuster Bob Parr, a.k.a. Mr. Incredible, a reluctantly retired superhero dealing with midlife malaise, to Helen Parr, a.k.a. Elastigirl, a housewife forced back into “hero work” who discovers she misses it a lot more than she thought she did, to Violet, a shy, awkward teenage girl with force-field/invisibility powers, caught between the “normalcy” she thinks she craves and the superhero side that both frightens and excites her. (Preteen speedster Dash doesn’t really change much, but then, he’s a kid, and he’s still a lot of fun.) We have abundant humor, much of it provided by Edna Mode, a fashion designer who creates fabulous and functional costumes for superheroes. (“No capes!”) We have an action-packed plot, as the superpowered Parr family must confront a power-hungry villain who’s been killing superheroes in order to steal their powers. And we have an outstanding voice cast, featuring Craig T. Nelson as Bob, Holly Hunter as Helen, director Brad Bird as Edna, Jason Lee as the villainous Syndrome, Samuel L. Jackson as Bob’s best buddy Lucius, a.k.a. Frozone, and Wallace Shawn making the most of his small role as Bob’s shouty Napoleon of a boss. The movie is like an enormous clock. All the cogs mesh, and it works beautifully.

1. Spirited Away (2002)

This Studio Ghibli film, the jewel in the justly acclaimed Japanese studio’s crown (among many), is visually like nothing you’ve seen. Its setting is a spa for gods, spirits, and monsters that only appears when the sun goes down, and oh, are those gods, spirits, and monsters a fantastically varied lot, some hideous, some beautiful, all weird. Humans who stumble onto this place in the daytime may think they’ve found a deserted amusement park. They’ll be all right as long as they follow a simple rule: Don’t eat the food! Alas, the human couple we meet at the beginning of the film aren’t able to resist the sumptuous smells when the food is laid out in preparation for the evening, and they sit down to gorge themselves. In no time, they’re transformed into pigs. It’s up to their awkward, frightened daughter, Chihiro, to save them. At first, this girl hardly seems up to the task, being the type to jump at her own shadow; her cowardice actually saves her from her parents’ fate, as she backs away from the tasty spread with a shiver and a shake of her head while they urge her to eat. However, as the wizard Gandalf once said of Bilbo Baggins, there is more about her than you guess. She finds in herself reserves of courage, resourcefulness, wisdom, and compassion as she navigates this strange and terrifying world. When she makes mistakes, she risks all to put them right, and by the movie’s conclusion she has saved more than just her parents. Studio Ghibli had made wonderful films about girls’ coming of age before, most notably My Neighbor Totoro and my sentimental favorite Kiki’s Delivery Service, but this is their most complex and perhaps the most rewarding treatment of the subject. It’s certainly far out in front of anything we’ve seen from a Western studio, save perhaps 2020’s Wolfwalkers.

And there it is, the finale of my Best Animated Feature winner rankings. Coming soon: the Best of the Rest (the nominees that didn’t take home the prize).

We’ve reached the Top Eleven in my ranking. From this point, every film on the list is one I love and have watched, or will watch, repeatedly.

11. Finding Nemo (2003)

This product of Pixar’s Golden Age features waterscapes stunning to behold and features such scene-stealing characters as Bruce, the Great White shark undergoing group therapy to change his fearsome carnivore image (“Fish are friends, not food!”) and Crush, the surfer-dude sea turtle whose laid back attitude provides an amusing contrast with protagonist Marlin’s nonstop anxiety. The movie begins on a note of horror, as Marlin the clownfish sees his wife and all their eggs but one wiped out, whereupon he dedicates his life to protecting his surviving offspring, the titular Nemo. When a SCUBA-diving dentist nabs Nemo and place him in an aquarium, Marlin must swim to his rescue, and both father and son must navigate uncharted territory. In terms of representation, male characters outnumber female, but we do get a step away from “male as default” with a major character who could have been male but instead just happens to be female: Dory, a blue tang who proves quite resourceful despite suffering from short-term memory loss. Instead of a bromance, we get a charming cross-gender friendship as the ever-optimistic Dory latches onto worrywart Marlin. The voices are perfectly cast, with Albert Brooks being his anxious A-game to the character of Marlin and Ellen DeGeneres endowing Dory with humor and warmth, but my favorite performance is Willem Dafoe’s as the scarred, hard-bitten Gil, whom Nemo meets in the aquarium and who helps him hatch an escape plan.

10. Shrek (2001)

The inaugural winner of the Best Animated Feature Oscar also served as Dreamworks Animation’s warning shot across the bow of the great ship Disney. On its initial release, fans of irony ate it up, relishing such parodies as the “Welcome to Duloc” song (take that, “It’s a Small World”!) and Princess Fiona’s duet with a songbird that ends with the poor bird’s blowing up (take that, Snow White!). But what gives this movie its staying power, for me, are the relationships — misanthropic ogre Shrek’s prickly bromance with the loquacious Donkey and his romance with a princess who isn’t quite what she seems. Fiona’s beauty doesn’t affect Shrek in the slightest; rather, he takes an interest in her when he sees that, as Donkey exclaims, “She’s as nasty as you are!” The romance evolves slowly, something we see all too rarely even in live-action films ostensibly aimed at adults. Also, the traditional Beauty-and-the-Beast formula is upended when Fiona gets her happy ending at the moment she no longer meets the accepted beauty standard. “I’m supposed to be beautiful,” the ogre-fied Fiona says with dismay. “You are beautiful,” the starry-eyed Shrek tells her. That’s all she needs to hear. Perfect. In the voice-acting area, Mike Myers (Shrek), Eddie Murphy (Donkey), Cameron Diaz (Fiona), and John Lithgow (the villainous Lord Farquaad, whose line “Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I am willing to make” has justly become a meme) all acquit themselves well.

9. Encanto (2021)

In many ways, this is one of those movies seemingly designed to please me. Funny, awkward heroine who likes to make things? Check. Lots and lots of female characters of various ages and body types? Check. One of those characters being a big-hearted Gentle Giant, a trope we rarely see in female guise? Check. A score full of bangers penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the giantess’s song being my favorite? Check. With all this, the story would have had to work hard to lose me. Thankfully, it didn’t. Mirabel, our resourceful, imaginative heroine, is the only non-magical member of a magical family, yet when the magic starts to fail, she takes it upon herself to save it, even though it means confronting her own sense of not-belonging and mending her dysfunctional relationships with her “perfect” older sister and authoritarian grandmother. On her quest to restore the magic, Mirabel becomes an agent of Truth, uncovering secrets that have the potential to upset the family order even more, at least as the stern Abuela Alma would have it. Luisa, our sweet giantess, feels she is worthless if she can’t be of service. Isabela, the perfect beauty with the power to grow vegetation, has a greater affinity for cacti than for the pretty pink flowers associated with her. Mirabel’s uncle Bruno, whom we don’t talk about, is not a ghoulish doomsayer but a loving brother and son with the burdensome “gift” of seeing the future, who has been hiding in the magical casita in order to be close to his family while sparing them his disruptive presence. Yet in the end, as the old saying goes, the Truth sets the family free, and Mirabel emerges with a healthier sense of her own value. Stephanie Beatriz (Mirabel), Maria Cecilia Botero (Abuela), and John Leguizamo (Bruno) are the standouts in a strong voice cast.

8. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)

In some years, the field of Best Animated Feature nominees is so strong that any one of them would be a deserving winner. This past year, I loved all but one of the nominees without reservation, the exception being Netflix’s The Sea Beast, which I liked a lot but didn’t quite love due to its overly familiar story beats. Pixar’s Turning Red is a rollicking look at puberty, friendships, and parent-child tensions, featuring an adorable girl protagonist who, in moments of high stress, transforms into an even more adorable giant red panda. Dreamworks’ Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a stunning sequel to an okay original, with a flawed but charismatic hero in Puss, a not-just-a-love-interest female lead in Kitty Softpaws, and two intriguing villains in the loathsome Big Jack Horner, so repulsive that even his would-be conscience dismisses him as beyond hope, and the mysterious whistling Wolf. A24’s Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is perhaps the most unique of all of them, a mockumentary about a sentient shell’s search for his missing family. You might be forgiven for thinking it’s a short-film gimmick stretched out to feature length, but actually watching the movie would prove how wrong you are as you come to love and root for the tiny Marcel; I should know, because this was exactly my experience.

In any other year, one of these films would have proudly walked away with the Oscar. But this was the year Netflix released Oscar-winning director and producer Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion labor of love, which manages to take a story we know and make it like nothing we’ve seen. His Pinocchio manages to tackle grief, love, death, and fascism with a deft hand. Gepetto and Sebastian J. Cricket are interesting, complex characters far more flawed than their Disney versions, with Gepetto more fearful than welcoming of the new presence in his life and Sebastian serving as Pinocchio’s conscience because there’s something in it for him, but this incarnation of Pinocchio, with his clumsy, confused, and curious joy in the life he’s been endowed with and his devotion to his gruff, troubled “father,” is the most sympathetic I’ve seen. Plus, the animation itself is nothing short of miraculous, a welcome break from the standard CGI we’ve grown so used to. And the nose-growing scenes actually service the plot!

7. Toy Story 3 (2010)

In 1995, Pixar Animation Studios burst on the scene with Toy Story, a hilarious and heartwarming examination of the psychology of toyhood. By treating its inanimate subjects with depth and empathy, Pixar showed itself to be something extraordinary, and it would exploit its strengths in character development throughout its Golden Age — which, many people assert, came to an end with the release of Toy Story 3. The gang of toys in Andy’s room, led by cowboy Woody and Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (brought vocally to life by Tom Hanks and Tim Allen), proved endearing and interesting enough to warrant sequels focusing on the progress of their “lives,” from Woody’s fear of being replaced and Buzz’s acceptance of his identity (Toy Story), to Woody’s growing awareness that as “his” kid grows up, all the toys will be abandoned (Toy Story 2), to the confrontation with that abandonment as Andy reaches college age (this particular film). Toy Story 3, much like Peter Jackson’s The Return of a King, is the climax of a remarkable story, a journey we in the audience have taken along with Woody and Buzz. True, Toy Story 4 came along nine years later to disturb the conclusion — the main reason a lot of people dislike the later film — but Toy Story 3‘s final scene, as Andy gifts his toys to little Bonnie and resists the temptation to hang onto Woody, remains note perfect. The movie also boasts a first-rate villain in Lotso Huggin’ Bear (Ned Beatty, kind of channeling Gene Hackman), a toy who ought to be adorable but is instead diabolical.

6. Inside Out (2015)

Not Pixar’s first movie with a female lead, but rather Pixar’s first great movie with a female lead, this movie takes us inside the mind of Riley, an athletic eleven-year-old girl whose happy life in Minnesota is uprooted when her dad gets a new job in San Francisco. Riley isn’t the real protagonist, though. That would be Joy, the embodiment of young Riley’s, well, joy, and the driving emotional force in her life so far, whose control over Riley’s mental and emotional console is threatened by the move and who considers it her job to keep Sadness (also female-coded) at bay. Joy’s impulsive reaction when Sadness touches one of Riley’s “core memories,” turning it from bring, happy green to gloomy blue, sends her and Sadness on a wild trip through Riley’s subconscious; meanwhile, the remaining emotions of Anger, Fear, and Disgust must seize control of the console for the first time and, of course, make a mess of their mission to keep things normal. Riley’s mental landscape is richly detailed, getting us invested in her even though we see very little of her from “outside.” The developing friendship between Joy and Sadness is satisfying, and Joy is a complex, flawed, and sometimes even infuriating protagonist — much like Woody, Bob “Mr. Incredible” Parr, Lightning McQueen, and Carl Frederickson. (Funny how these male leads are commonly loved and admired despite their mistakes, while Joy has haters unwilling to forgive hers.) Amy Poehler (Joy), Phyllis Smith (Sadness), Lewis Black (Anger), Bill Hader (Fear), Mindy Kaling (Disgust), and Richard Kind (Riley’s one-time imaginary friend Bing Bong) all turn in solid performances that add to the film’s zing.

As with all Pixar’s best films, Inside Out has its heartbreaking moments, most notably Bing Bong’s noble sacrifice to help restore Joy and Sadness to the console where they belong (“Take her to the moon for me, will you?”). But the most depressing aspect, for me, is the glimpse we get of the mental and emotional consoles of Riley’s parents. Joy is Riley’s driving force, but we see that Sadness controls the mother’s console while Anger drives the father’s. Joy’s initial refusal to surrender control of Riley’s console or acknowledge the importance of Sadness might be seen as “toxic positivity” in action, but the alternative is no more desirable — that as we reach adulthood, we become less and less satisfied with our lives. This, perhaps, is the film’s warning to the adults in the audience. We need Joy as much as Riley needs Sadness.

My husband and I went to our local movie theater to see Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken the other night. Normally a rating in the 60% range on Rotten Tomatoes would put us off, but the trailer looked like fun, and hey, a kraken heroine, which we’ve certainly never seen before, sounded like my jam. So we took a chance — and we ended up leaving the theater a little bitter at having, as my husband put it, “spent our money on mediocrity.” The movie only served to reinforce an unpleasant conclusion I’d come to when the reviews for Ruby Gillman first started to accumulate: that Dreamworks Animation, which seemed to be having a moment with last year’s one-two punch of The Bad Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, doesn’t even bother to try when their project has a female lead.

Among Dreamworks’ filmography, the following movies center on a female protagonist: Chicken Run (97% RT rating), Monsters vs. Aliens (74%), Home (52%), Trolls (nominally, 75%), The Croods (nominally, 72%), Abominable (82%), Spirit Untamed (48%), and the aforementioned Ruby Gillman (68%). Of this meager number, only Chicken Run and Abominable boast a critical consensus that suggests a substantial degree of effort was put into them, and only one, the delightful Chicken Run, might manage to earn a place among fans’ rankings of the studio’s top-notch output. Yet despite its charms, Chicken Run — perhaps because it’s regarded as more Aardman Animation than Dreamworks Animation — is rarely mentioned in discussions of Dreamworks’ best films, with The Prince of Egypt, the first two Shrek films, the Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon trilogies, and now Puss in Boots: The Last Wish coming up a lot. To be fair, the studio has made their share of “mid” films with male leads as well, most notably The Boss Baby (although that film, despite having one of the most cringe-inducing trailers I’ve ever had the misfortune to see, still managed to make money), but with the possible exception of Chicken Run (if we credit it as Dreamworks rather than Aardman), all of the studio’s best movies center on male protagonists.

Why does Dreamworks seemingly refuse to bring their A game when making a movie with a girl as the lead? I wish I knew, but I have a theory that saddens me. It goes back to that old and disheartening notion that while stories centering on boys/men have universal appeal, stories about girls/women appeal only to girls. A story with a male lead, therefore, must please everyone; money is riding on it, and so more time and creative energy must be put into it. But a story with a female lead only has to be “good enough” to please girls, so the studio may adopt the cynical view that girls, having so little material out there for them, will take whatever they’re given. The low box office numbers for Ruby Gillman suggest this approach isn’t working for them.

Something else I’ve noticed as I’ve been pondering my rankings of Best Animated Feature Oscar winners (which I’ll resume in my next post, I promise) is a difference in the roles given to male characters in female-driven projects and the roles given to female characters in male-driven ones. Consider Zootopia and Moana, both nominated for 2016’s Best Animated Feature. Judy Hopps is the former film’s protagonist, but Nick Wilde is almost as important and just as interesting. Likewise, while Moana is a heroine well worth rooting for, male demigod Maui steals the show by being funny and brash in a way she isn’t allowed to be. (He also gets the movie’s best song, “You’re Welcome.”)

Characters like Nick and Maui will “bring the boys in,” giving them someone they’ll enjoy identifying with so they won’t feel the need to step into the shoes of the female lead. Almost every well-known animated movie with a female protagonist features one or more scene-stealing males: Sebastian in The Little Mermaid, Lumiere and Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast, Mushu in Mulan, Rocky in Chicken Run, Ray and Louis in The Princess and the Frog, Flynn Rider in Tangled, Olaf in Frozen… the list goes on. If characters like these don’t feature heavily, the “wisdom” suggests, then boys won’t show up for the movie, so these roles must be built up, with plenty of visibility in the marketing and plenty of merchandise devoted to them — with the consequence that many an animated heroine isn’t even the most memorable character in her own movie. (Also, in some non-English speaking countries, Tangled was actually titled Rapunzel. In the United States, the movie became Tangled because boys wouldn’t touch The Princess and The Frog.)

Traditionally, no such concerns about big-tent box office have arisen with animated features with male leads; if the protagonist was male, the tent was assumed to be plenty big, and so we saw films like The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book, and then, some years later, Brother Bear, in which female characters only exist if a five-minute villain or a three-minute love interest is needed. More recent male-led films have been a bit more inclusive, with one or occasionally two female characters included to fill the role that the Reel Girl blog calls the “Minority Feisty,” the outspoken, hot-tempered, sometimes capable girl who, even when she is at her most badass, never manages to outshine the male hero or steal any scenes. Rarely is the “Minority Feisty” an animated film’s most memorable character. Almost as rarely is she the character with whom the girls in the audience will identify. How many girls want to see themselves in junior harridan Penny (Mr. Peabody and Sherman)? Or imbecile older sister Courtney (ParaNorman)? Or the underdeveloped “Smurfettes” Gloria (the Madagascar franchise), Tooth Fairy (Rise of the Guardians), or Kevin the bird (Up)? It’s assumed that the girls will instead imprint on the more developed male characters, because girls can do that. We’ve been socialized to connect with characters who don’t share our gender — which is, on the whole, a very good thing. It’s just a shame the same isn’t expected of, or conditioned in, boys.

Boys’ presumed inability to relate to female protagonists, along with the view that boys’ stories are universal while girls’ stories are niche, may be a contributing factor in a number of social ills, among them some (though far from all) male authors’ inability to create interesting and complex female characters who feel like real people rather than a mysterious, incomprehensible Other. Yet I hold out hope that things might yet change, that boys rushing to the theaters to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse might recognize parts of themselves in Gwen as well as in Miles, Peter, or Hobie. They who die by the story might, in time, live by the story.