The 25 Best Anime Movies of All Time

Anime's film canon is a strange shelf to stand in front of. It holds a children's story about a bathhouse for spirits, a body-horror thriller about the cost of fame, a war film that will ruin your week, and a cyberpunk epic that half the people who cite it have never actually finished.

There is no single "best" here, because these films aren't trying to do the same thing. What follows is ranked anyway — ranking forces an argument, and an argument is more useful to you than a list of titles everyone already agrees on.

Each entry says why it's here, who it's for, and whether it's worth owning rather than streaming. That last part matters more than it used to: streaming licences expire without warning, and a lot of these films have vanished from services for months at a time.

1. Spirited Away (2001, Hayao Miyazaki)

A ten-year-old girl's parents are turned into pigs and she has to work in a bathhouse for gods to get them back. That's the plot. What makes it the best animated film ever made is that Miyazaki refuses to explain any of it.

There's no exposition about how the spirit world works, no villain with a plan, no moral delivered to camera. Chihiro is frightened, then competent, then kind, and the film simply follows her through a world that has its own rules and no obligation to share them. The bathhouse is crowded with creatures the story never names. Rooms exist that the plot has no use for.

That confidence is why it survives rewatching for decades. You notice new things because there are new things to notice, not because you missed a clue.

Who it's for: everyone. If you're starting someone on anime films, start here.
Worth owning: yes. It's the one film on this list you'll rewatch every few years, and it's had the most careful home-video treatment of any Ghibli title.

2. Grave of the Fireflies (1988, Isao Takahata)

Two children try to survive in Japan in the final months of the Second World War. The opening scene tells you how it ends, so the rest of the film is not suspense — it's watching, knowing.

Takahata was making an argument, and it wasn't the comforting one. This isn't a film about the nobility of suffering. It's about how a society at war quietly decides which of its members are worth feeding, and how ordinary decency evaporates when there isn't enough to go round. The aunt who takes the children in isn't a monster. That's the point.

It is the best film on this list and I would not tell anyone to watch it twice.

Who it's for: adults, once, when you have nothing on the following day.
Worth owning: debatable, and I mean that. Some films you keep out of respect rather than for rewatching.

3. Perfect Blue (1997, Satoshi Kon)

A pop idol leaves her group to become an actress, takes a role that requires her to be degraded on camera, and starts losing the ability to tell which parts of her life are real. Kon's debut feature, and still the most technically impressive thing he did.

The editing is the trick. Kon cuts between reality, performance, dream and delusion using match cuts so clean you don't register the transition until you're already lost — which is exactly the experience the protagonist is having. Aronofsky bought the remake rights and reused the bathtub shot in Requiem for a Dream; the debt to this film across the next twenty years of Western thrillers is substantial and rarely acknowledged.

It also, in 1997, predicted almost everything unpleasant about internet fame. The stalker's website reads like it was written last year.

Who it's for: anyone who likes psychological thrillers. No anime background needed.
Worth owning: yes. It's been restored well and it rewards a second viewing enormously — you can watch the seams you missed.

4. Princess Mononoke (1997, Hayao Miyazaki)

A young man is cursed while defending his village and travels west to find the cause, arriving in a war between an industrial iron-working town and the gods of the forest it's consuming.

What makes it Miyazaki's most serious film is that both sides are right. Lady Eboshi is destroying an ancient forest; she is also giving shelter and paid work to lepers and former brothel workers who had neither. San is defending her home; she is also inseparable from a violence she can't step out of. The film refuses to resolve this, and its ending is a truce rather than a victory.

Also, genuinely: one of the great action films. The opening demon-boar sequence has never been bettered in animation.

Who it's for: people who think animation can't be adult.
Worth owning: yes.

5. Akira (1988, Katsuhiro Otomo)

Neo-Tokyo, 2019. A biker gang, a secret government psychic programme, and a boy whose powers exceed the state's ability to contain them.

The plot is a compression of six manga volumes into two hours and it shows — the second half moves through events faster than it explains them, and the ending is more felt than understood. This is the film's reputation problem: people cite it for its influence and quietly admit they got lost.

Watch it anyway, for the animation. It was made with a budget nobody had spent on anime before, hand-drawn at a frame rate and density that studios still can't match, and it looks better than most things made this decade. The bike slide is famous for a reason. The city feels inhabited in a way CG cities don't.

Who it's for: anyone interested in animation as craft. Manage your expectations on the story.
Worth owning: yes, and this is the one where the 4K transfer genuinely earns its price — the detail in the crowd scenes and the neon is the whole point.

6. Your Name (2016, Makoto Shinkai)

Two teenagers wake up in each other's bodies, intermittently, without explanation. For about forty minutes it's a very good comedy about the indignity of being someone else. Then the film turns, and the turn is one of the best structural surprises in modern cinema.

Shinkai's weakness has always been that he'd rather look at a beautiful sky than finish a thought. Here the emotional engineering is airtight, and the visual obsession finally serves the story rather than replacing it. It became the highest-grossing anime film in the world for a reason, and the reason isn't marketing.

Who it's for: everyone. The best "I don't watch anime" conversion film on this list.
Worth owning: yes. The 4K release is one of the few where the light — and this film is entirely about light — visibly benefits.

7. My Neighbour Totoro (1988, Hayao Miyazaki)

Two sisters move to the countryside while their mother is in hospital, and meet a large creature who lives in a tree.

There is no antagonist, no jeopardy, and almost no plot. What there is instead is the most accurate depiction of being a small child ever animated — the boredom, the intensity, the way a five-year-old's fury and joy arrive at full volume with nothing in between. The famous bus-stop scene works because it's the only strange thing in twenty minutes of ordinary waiting.

The film's real subject is the mother's illness, which it barely mentions and never resolves on screen. Children watch it as an adventure. Parents watch it and understand what the film is actually about.

Who it's for: children, and their parents, for entirely different reasons.
Worth owning: yes — it's the most rewatched film on this list in any household with kids.

8. Paprika (2006, Satoshi Kon)

A therapist uses a device that lets her enter patients' dreams. The device is stolen. Dreams start leaking into the waking world.

Kon's last film before his death in 2010, and his most visually unrestrained. The parade sequence — appliances, dolls, torii gates, all singing — is the single most inventive stretch of animation in this list. Inception owes it a debt it has never quite settled.

It's less disciplined than Perfect Blue and more fun. Where that film used dream logic to frighten you, this one uses it to show off, and the showing off is worth the ticket.

Who it's for: people who want to see what animation can do that live action can't.
Worth owning: yes.

9. A Silent Voice (2016, Naoko Yamada)

A boy who bullied a deaf classmate in primary school tries, years later, to make amends. The film is careful to make this difficult and not especially redemptive.

Yamada directs attention better than almost anyone working — feet, hands, the backs of heads, the specific way a teenager looks at the floor rather than a face. Very little is said out loud because the characters are all incapable of saying it, and the film trusts you to read bodies instead of dialogue.

It handles suicidal ideation and disability with more care than most live-action drama manages, and it never lets its protagonist off the hook. He isn't forgiven because he feels bad.

Who it's for: anyone who liked Eighth Grade or Aftersun. Content warning for self-harm and bullying.
Worth owning: yes.

10. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013, Isao Takahata)

A tiny girl found inside a bamboo stalk grows into a noblewoman courted by five suitors, none of whom see her.

Takahata's final film, and the most beautiful-looking thing on this list — charcoal and watercolour, lines left visibly unfinished, backgrounds that dissolve into bare paper when the emotion peaks. When Kaguya finally runs, the animation abandons refinement entirely and becomes furious scribble. Nothing else looks like it.

It's slow, it's long, and it's about the specific grief of being loved as an object. Stay for the last twenty minutes.

Who it's for: patient viewers. People who care about animation as drawing.
Worth owning: yes, if you rate it at all — this is a film to look at.

11–25: the rest of the shelf

11. Ghost in the Shell (1995, Mamoru Oshii) — A cyborg counter-terrorism officer hunts a hacker and starts questioning whether there's anything inside her that's hers. Colder and slower than its reputation; the philosophy is genuine but delivered in long static conversations. The Wachowskis lifted a great deal of The Matrix from it. Worth owning for the score alone.

12. In This Corner of the World (2016, Sunao Katabuchi) — A young woman marries into a family in Kure and lives through the war. Where Grave of the Fireflies is a howl, this is a life: small, funny, domestic, and devastating precisely because it keeps being ordinary. The most underrated film on this list.

13. Redline (2009, Takeshi Koike) — An illegal race on a hostile planet. Seven years and roughly a hundred thousand hand-drawn frames for a film with no ideas whatsoever, and it doesn't need any. Pure kinetic craft. Put it on loud.

14. Wolf Children (2012, Mamoru Hosoda) — A woman raises two children who are part wolf, alone, in the countryside. A film about single parenthood that happens to have a fantasy premise, and Hosoda's warmest work.

15. The End of Evangelion (1997, Hideaki Anno) — The real ending to the series, made in fury after the TV finale. Incoherent, hostile, and one of the most genuinely upsetting things animated. Do not start here; you must watch the series first.

16. Millennium Actress (2001, Satoshi Kon) — A documentary crew interviews a retired film star and the interview collapses into her filmography. Kon's most elegant construction — the cuts do the storytelling. Underseen next to Perfect Blue and Paprika.

17. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984, Hayao Miyazaki) — The film that got Ghibli founded. A princess tries to prevent a war in a poisoned world. Rougher than what came after, and more radical: the ecological argument here is angrier than in Mononoke.

18. Tokyo Godfathers (2003, Satoshi Kon) — Three homeless people find an abandoned baby at Christmas. A screwball comedy with genuine compassion for people cinema usually uses as scenery. Kon's most likeable film.

19. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006, Mamoru Hosoda) — A schoolgirl discovers she can jump backwards in time and uses it, initially, for nothing important. Gets the ending right, which time-travel stories usually don't.

20. Howl's Moving Castle (2004, Hayao Miyazaki) — A young woman is cursed into old age and takes work in a wizard's walking house. The first half is perfect and the second half loses its thread, but the first half is very perfect. Sophie's aged voice performance is one of Ghibli's best.

21. Whisper of the Heart (1995, Yoshifumi Kondō) — Two teenagers, a library card, and a violin workshop. Nothing supernatural happens. It's a film about deciding what you're going to be, and it's the most quietly generous thing Ghibli produced. Kondō died at 47; this was his only feature.

22. Belle (2021, Mamoru Hosoda) — A shy girl becomes a global singer inside a VR world. Muddled in its back half, but the concert sequences are spectacular and the central idea — that a performing self can be more honest than a real one — is worth the unevenness.

23. Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (2020, Haruo Sotozaki) — The highest-grossing Japanese film ever made. It's a mid-series arc, so it's not a standalone story, but the Rengoku material in the final third is the best action animation of the last decade. Requires the series first.

24. Only Yesterday (1991, Isao Takahata) — A 27-year-old woman travels to the countryside and is accompanied by memories of herself at ten. An adult film about ordinary regret, made when almost no one was making animation for adults about nothing in particular.

25. Ninja Scroll (1993, Yoshiaki Kawajiri) — Violent, lurid, superbly animated, and morally unbothered. It's on the list because it's the best example of a whole era of anime — the direct-to-video action film — and because the fight choreography still holds up. Not for everyone; deliberately so.

Where to start if you've never watched one

Four films, in this order:

1. Spirited Away — no prerequisites, no genre literacy required
2. Your Name — proves modern anime can do mainstream drama better than most live action
3. Princess Mononoke — the "animation isn't for children" argument, made conclusively
4. Perfect Blue — a thriller that happens to be animated

If those four don't take, this isn't for you, and that's a perfectly reasonable outcome.

The best romance anime movies

Your Name is the obvious answer and it's the correct one. After that: Whisper of the Heart for something quiet and real, A Silent Voice if you want the difficult kind, and Weathering With You (2019, Shinkai) if you liked Your Name and want the same machine run again slightly less well.

Makoto Shinkai is essentially the genre by himself. Start with Your Name, then work backwards through 5 Centimetres per Second (2007) — which is beautiful and will annoy you, deliberately.

The ones that will devastate you

In order of damage:

1. Grave of the Fireflies — the standard answer, and unbeaten
2. In This Corner of the World — hurts more slowly and lasts longer
3. A Silent Voice — the only one on this list that offers something afterwards
4. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya — a specific, unusual grief
5. Wolf Children — sneaks up on parents in the final fifteen minutes

Watch none of these on a weeknight.

Underrated: five nobody puts on these lists

• In This Corner of the World — should be top five on every list and never is
• Millennium Actress — Kon's best-constructed film, forever third in his own filmography
• Only Yesterday — was barely released in English for twenty-five years
• Whisper of the Heart — dismissed as minor Ghibli; isn't
• Mind Game (2004, Masaaki Yuasa) — genuinely unhinged, formally reckless, unlike anything else here

Owning these rather than streaming them

Three honest reasons to buy physical:

Licences expire. Films leave services with no notice and no pattern. Several titles on this list have been unavailable to stream in English-speaking regions for months at a stretch. A disc doesn't do that.

Compression is visible on hand-drawn animation. Film grain, fine line work, and the big flat colour gradients that anime loves are exactly what streaming bitrates handle worst. On Akira's neon and Your Name's skies, the difference isn't audiophile nonsense — you can see it.

The extras only exist on disc. Storyboards, commentaries, interviews with people who are now dead. Streaming carries none of it.

What's worth the 4K upgrade: films with a genuine high-resolution restoration behind them — Akira, Your Name, Ghost in the Shell. What isn't: catalogue titles where the 4K disc is upscaled from the same master as the Blu-ray. Check what the transfer source actually is before paying twice.

One thing for Australian readers: Blu-ray regions are A, B and C. Japan and North America are both Region A; Australia is Region B. A Japanese import will not play on a locked Australian player. Region-free players solve this and are worth it if you import.

→ Our picks: the anime editions actually worth owning

Frequently asked questions

What is the best anime movie of all time?
Spirited Away. It's the most complete, most rewatchable and most confident film in the medium, and it requires nothing of a newcomer. Grave of the Fireflies is the better film by some measures and much harder to recommend.

What anime movie should I watch first?
Spirited Away, then Your Name. Neither assumes any familiarity with anime.

What's the highest-grossing anime film?
Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (2020), which overtook Spirited Away after nearly two decades.

Are anime movies worth buying on Blu-ray?
For anything you'll rewatch, yes — streaming licences expire and compression is visibly worse on animation. For a film you'll watch once, no.

Do Japanese Blu-rays work on my player?
Japan is Region A, the same as North America. Australia and the UK are Region B, so Japanese discs need a region-free player.

Which anime films need you to watch the series first?
The End of Evangelion and Demon Slayer: Mugen Train are both unwatchable cold. Everything else here is standalone.

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