Cartoons are awesome! Action movies are awesome! But what about cartoons that are also action movies? The best! But how the hell do you narrow such a broad category down to just 10? Great question, and one I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. And here’s what I got – these are the 10 best animated action movies of all time, or at the very least a non-definitive but carefully curated list of 10 animated action movies worthy of your attention, in no particular order.
On a literal level, the idea of animated action is basically redundant: Action is animate and animation is active. But for the sake of this list, let’s limit it to movies, as in feature films, with a substantial amount of fast-paced exciting stuff happening thanks to the magic of animation.
Oh and let’s get something out of the way – this list could, and depending on who you ask, probably should be 100% Japanese anime. In the West, a lot of the entertainment industry has operated under the assumption that animation is for children, and action movies are violent, and since children shouldn’t watch violent things, there’s no reason to make animated action movies – and obviously, that’s not true. So, yes, Akira and Princess Mononoke and Ghost in the Shell are on this list, but I wanted to take more of a variety pack approach here.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Adapting the Medium
Despite the fact that “cartoon” can refer to sequential illustration on the printed page or in animated form, most “comic book movies” go the live-action route. Over the years, quite a few films have emulated various comic styles: Warren Beatty upped the saturation in Dick Tracy to capture that vintage four-color newsprint vibe, while Robert Rodriguez did the opposite with Sin City, aping Frank Miller’s high-contrast monochromatic inks. For Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright cherry-picked thought bubbles, speed lines, and visible sound effects from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s hit Canadian manga. However, one movie puts them all to shame: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
This movie took the naturally kinetic medium of animation and injected every single frame with the visual flair that made superheroes come to life on the printed page in the first place; Into the Spider-Verse looks like it was bombarded with comic rays…Or bitten by a radioactive comic book, though that doesn’t sound as clever.
If Spider-Verse had had a more conventional art style, it would have still been excellent – it deftly weaves a compelling story involving the multiverse, multiple heroes and a handful of remixed villains. Superhero movies have struggled to do this while using well-established characters, but Spider-Verse did so while also introducing – and endearing – audiences to a whole new Spider-Man in Miles Morales. It is extremely rare to find a movie that leaps so gracefully between being action-packed, sad, heartfelt and laugh-out-loud funny without faltering or completely falling flat. But Into the Spider-Verse not only bounced between dimensions narratively, it also did so visually, blurring the lines between 2D and 3D animation to create something with a truly distinct look.
Toy Story, the first computer-animated feature film, revolutionized the animation industry at the drop of a painstakingly rendered cowboy hat. Almost 30 years later, even the most staunch 2D cel animation purists have to admit that CG has gotten past its awkward teenage years, but it has also seemed like it plateaued in a sense. Computer animation is capable of virtually anything, but for a minute there, it seemed like most studios were playing it safe, including Pixar.
Thankfully, Sony Pictures Animation’s spin on the iconic wall-crawler seemed to be the bite in the arm the medium needed. The studio’s follow-up, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, was equally dynamic, albeit more conventional family fare, and Dreamworks’ Puss in Boots: The Last Wish gave the Shrek sidekick a fresh coat of paint. Across the pacific, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero went the 3D CGI route. This was a controversial choice, given that Goku’s 20 previous film and 639 TV show appearances kept things conventionally flat. The new look rubbed some fans the wrong way, but it also allowed for some phenomenal fight scenes and more subtle shading that was reminiscent of Akira Toriyama’s manga covers.
Currently waiting in the shadows, Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem looks to be equal parts Eastman and Laird and eighth-grade notebook doodles. Best of all, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will have Mile Morales returning to swing into multiple dimensions, each with its own unique art style… and that’s just the first of two sequels announced.
It’s surprising that there haven’t been more animated superhero movies. Into the Spider-Verse was only the second animated Marvel movie to hit theaters, after Big Hero 6. DC’s fared a little better, with Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, and more recently, The LEGO Batman Movie and Teen Titans GO! To the Movies, but that’s pathetic compared to the number of live-action comic book adaptations we’ve gotten. Here’s hoping the Spider-Verse sequels blaze a trail for more.
The Adventures of Tintin
Performance Capture
What constitutes live-action at this point? Considering how much CGI is in your average 21st century blockbuster movie, many of them are basically animated features with a splash of flesh and blood. Then again, it goes both ways. Thanks to performance capture technology, we’ve seen human actors physically playing the parts of animated characters. One of the best action movies to take this approach is a frustratingly underrated popcorn flick that wouldn’t have been nearly as fun in conventional live-action, The Adventures of Tintin.
Including this movie on this list might raise a few eyebrows, but hear me out: Steven Spielberg’s 2011 adaptation of the beloved Belgian comics might have had one foot in live-action, and its quasi-realistic CGI cast might perch precariously on the slope of the uncanny valley, but it’s also a pitch-perfect demonstration of how much higher the animated ceiling for spectacle is compared to live-action. Plus, it shows how the right visual style can pull its weight when it comes to suspension of disbelief.
There’s a universe where Spielberg decided to shoot the Tintin movie in live-action, but there’s also one where it was laughed out of the room for over-the-top action set pieces that relied too heavily on CGI – you know, kind of like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which was the director’s project immediately prior to Tintin.
Thankfully, we got an animated Tintin, and at no point does it come across as “unrealistic,” because at no point does it put believability over fun. Instead, it leans heavily into the slapstick cartooniness of the original comics. The film could have benefitted from the human characters being rendered with a little less realistic detail, but they mostly read as caricatures – exaggerated approximations of people, rather than actual human beings. You know, cartoon characters. The movie literally opens with Tintin having his caricature drawn by a street artist.
Nobody bats an eyelash when a cartoon character jump-starts a sputtering airplane engine by belching whiskey breath into the gas tank, or when two cartoon characters duel with massive cargo cranes, but a real person swinging on vines with CGI monkeys or surviving a nuclear blast in a fridge is a bit of a harder sell. Really, The Adventures of Tintin is a strong argument for an animated Indiana Jones movie, and if nothing else, it’s a damn good action movie that successfully translates the charm of a beloved comic book to a new medium while trying ambitious new things with revolutionary filmmaking technology.
Now if only we could get the other two thirds of the Tintin trilogy that were supposedly in the works. I wanna see that boy reporter and his drunk friend on the moon, or the bottom of the ocean.
Ghost in the Shell
Influential Anime
Modern Hollywood action movies likely wouldn’t be what they are today without the influence of The Matrix, and The Matrix wouldn’t exist without taking heavy influence from what is unquestionably one of the finest anime films ever made: Ghost in the Shell.
Ghost in the Shell, the movie, is a sublime intersection of style and substance. The manga of the same name was written and illustrated by Masamune Shirow, whose visuals, with all due respect, considerably outweigh his storytelling – like literally. He’s published way more artbooks than narrative manga. And I know artbooks are heavier because they’re printed on better paper, but work with me here.
The Ghost in the Shell manga has smatterings of hyper-detailed, technically complex cyberpunk illustrations, but periodically lapses into comedic sketchiness. This kind of tonal elasticity is not uncommon in manga or in anime, but one reason the Ghost in the Shell movie is regarded so highly is how heavily it commits to realism in every single frame.
For instance, take Kusanagi’s battle with the Tachikoma: a sexy cyborg fighting a giant robotic spider tank is such a capital-A Anime-Ass concept that some speed lines, freeze-frame action shots and cool-looking lens flare effects are almost expected, but the whole fight has the weight of the most practical real-life stunt sequence. A lot of bullets and debris and sparks fly throughout, but if you look closely, the sparks only fly when the bullets are ricocheting off metal surfaces.
This attention to detail is evenly distributed throughout the film, all the way down to the credits – and if you pull the right frames, those strings of numbers that blink by do actually translate to the names shown on screen, which was probably a lot of work for something no one actually noticed. Meanwhile, the code in The Matrix is allegedly cobbled together from random text the production designer pulled from one of his wife’s Japanese cookbooks.
It’s easy to point to Ghost in the Shell as proof that cel animation is good and CGI Is bad, but the film made heavy use of the latest tech for certain sequences, but always as a tool rather than a crutch: Certain shots were digitally manipulated to subtly mimic the distortion a camera lens creates. Besides, the film revolves around the intersection of humanity and technology, so it’s hard to think of a movie better suited to tinker with the balance between digital and analog animation.
Ironically, the live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell, starring real humans, was thoroughly devoid of humanity. It lived up to its namesake in all the wrong ways. Despite faithfully recreating several iconic scenes and featuring some technically solid visual effects, it didn’t do anything to justify its own existence. Whereas the anime added dimension to the manga, the live-action version was about as ankle-deep as a flooded Hong Kong alleyway – which just goes to show how the original movie is greater than the sum of its parts.
Fire and Ice
Performance Capture Before It Was Cool
The fact that animation is seen as a second-class medium to live-action filmmaking is especially infuriating when you consider cartoons were the first motion pictures, taking the form of phenakistoscopes and zoetropes long before Edison staked his claim to the kinetograph.
Performance capture – the digital kind with the jumpsuits covered in ping pong balls and triangles – is new technology. However, the underlying principle of using actual human movements as the basis for animation is not. It bears a lot of similarities to rotoscoping, where live-action performances are traced to create animation with especially realistic movement. While it might seem like cutting corners, it’s arguably more work than just filming a movie or just animating a cartoon, since you basically have to shoot an entire film and then draw over every frame of it. Why not just keep it live action? My favorite example of this has to be Fire and Ice.
Fire and Ice, Ralph Bakshi’s epic fantasy collaboration with legendary painter Frank Frazetta could’ve very easily been given the live-action treatment. After all, Frazetta made a name for himself with the covers of the Conan the Barbarian novels, and live-action Conan conquered the big screen a year before Fire and Ice released. Instead, we got an animated feature that looked like a cross between a Hanna-Barbera cartoon and a Manowar album cover. I… I actually meant that in a good way.
The story has that same hazy lugubriousness of so many ’80s fantasy films, and the animation isn’t exactly breathtaking, so it’s not surprising it’s rarely called a classic without the “cult” caveat – but it’s still a fascinatingly ambitious approach to filmmaking. This wasn’t Bakshi’s first foray into epic fantasy, though. A few years before Fire and Ice, he took a similar rotoscoped approach to The Lord of the Rings. It was much less cohesive visually, often scrapping animation entirely for grainy, stylized live-action sequences. Part of the reason I felt the need to call out Fire and Ice specifically, other than that it’s metal as f#ck, is as a nod to Ralph Bakshi. His X-rated cult hits like Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic aren’t action movies by a long shot, but they paved the way for a lot of the other stuff on this list by proving that cartoons weren’t just for kids.
Heavy Metal
Cartoons That Weren’t Just For Kids
Much in the same way that Into the Spider-Verse feels so authentically like flipping through a superhero comic, there’s another piece of animation that feels like it’s sprung from the mysteriously sticky pages of another iconic periodical: Heavy Metal.
Much like the magazine of the same name, Heavy Metal is an anthology of vignettes presented in jarringly different aesthetics and tones. The common thread is an all-powerful villain/otherworldly McGuffin, the Loc-Nar, which is somewhere between the One Ring and the trunk of that Chevy Malibu from Repo Man.
Rather than straight adaptations of existing stories, the movie is mostly a hodgepodge of ideas and elements pulled from throughout Heavy Metal’s issues. The magazine itself was something of a remix of another publication already: Metal Hurlant, which had been co-founded by the hugely influential comics artist Jean Giraud, AKA Moebius.
National Lampoon made a deal to publish Metal Hurlant stateside. As you might expect, a magazine full of cartoon boobies was more risque in the US than in France so Heavy Metal found its home amidst the dirty magazines rather than in the regular comic rack. Fittingly enough, the movie was produced by Ivan Reitman, whose big break had been National Lampoon’s Animal House, and that’s likely why Heavy Metal has such a raucous and bawdy tone. You know, alien truckers voiced by Harold Ramis and Eugene Levy hoovering up space cocaine because they’re bummed the voluptuous Earthling woman decided she wanted to boink robot John Candy instead of them. Sex drugs and rock and roll, not necessarily in that order.
Had the movie been a French production rooted in Metal Hurlant, it probably would’ve had a very different tone – if Moebius was involved, it might’ve looked more like Fantastic Planet, and my guess is it would’ve had a dreamy soundtrack by Tangerine Dream or Vangelis instead of needle drops of B-sides from Blue Öyster Cult and Cheap Trick.
Heavy Metal wouldn’t exist without Moebius and neither would Alien or Blade Runner. Among other things, the artist provided original concept art for Ridley Scott’s genre-defining space horror. While making his follow-up, Blade Runner, Scott referred to Moebius’s dystopian cityscapes as semi-literal blueprints.
It’s crazy to think that the year before Blade Runner took moviegoers to 2019 Los Angeles, Heavy Metal gave them a tour of 2031 Manhattan. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a gruff New York taxi driver’s world is turned upside down when a gorgeous and scantily-clad redhead tumbles into the back of his cab, and he’s soon caught in a web of intrigue. Okay, so that’s a boilerplate film noir setup, but the Harry Canyon segment of Heavy Metal is also beat for beat The Fifth Element, narratively, but even more so visually.
The Fifth Element pulls from a few works of Moebius, namely The Long Tomorrow and The Incal. Moebius actually tried to sue Luc Besson for how much the film resembled The Incal specifically, but that didn’t pan out, probably because he’d already gotten paid to do concept work on it. That doesn’t mean The Fifth Element isn’t shamelessly derivative, because it is. See also: Juan Gimenez’s The Fourth Power.
Presently the only Heavy Metal sequel that exists is Heavy Metal 2000, and it’s sadly a lot less interesting than the sequel that never happened. In the late aughts, there was talk of a new movie that would allegedly involve the talents of filmmakers James Cameron, Zack Snyder, and Gore Verbinski, noted metalhead Jack Black, and Ninja Turtles co-creator turned Heavy Metal magazine owner/publisher Kevin Eastman. The project was to be overseen by director David Fincher and Tim Miller, whose work on CGI trailers at Blur Studios made him an ideal candidate.
Sadly, like so many other Heavy Metal supergroups, this one also disbanded – but David Fincher and Tim Miller did give us one of the best Heavy Metal spiritual successors to date: the Netflix original animated anthology series Love Death + Robots.
Heavy Metal is like the goofy stoner cousin of some of the greatest science fiction films ever made; at face value it has almost nothing in common with Alien and Blade Runner, but they’re related. The influence of Heavy Metal, the magazine and the movie, can’t be understated. Much like the work of Ralph Bakshi, Heavy Metal is partially responsible for laying the groundwork for anime’s arrival in the West.
But of course, anime might never have blown up if that groundwork hadn’t been instantaneously vaporized by the arrival of…
Akira
…This Heading Is Just Called “Akira”
Akira, at the time of its production, was the most expensive animated feature film ever produced, and it’s singlehandedly responsible for making anime the global phenomenon it is today. I could sit here gushing over how much of a singularly brilliant piece of media it is, and how the animators literally had to invent a new color palette to bring it to life, or how practically every frame is packed with detail and if you watch it in 4K you can actually identify the kinds of liquor behind the bar or the albums in the jukebox… But let’s focus on what Akira is at face value: a f#cking awesome action movie that just so happens to be animated.
The film’s plot could be described as manic, which is unsurprising when you consider the manga that inspired it is a whopping 2000 pages. The film mostly adapts the first two volumes, almost recklessly scrapping a whole lot of character development and contextual information. But it does so aggressively, seemingly prioritizing action. In the film, characters who have entire story arcs in the manga are brutally disposed of on screen without uttering a line, almost like they’re being jettisoned from a moving vehicle so it can go faster. This might feel like an affront to the source material, if not for the fact that Katsuhiro Otomo, the manga’s artist and writer, also directed the film. Instead, the film feels like an artist truly taking full advantage of a different medium. No amount of speed lines can convey a sense of speed like something that’s actually moving really fast, and despite their best efforts, sound effects on a printed page are silent.
The movie, of course, is anything but silent – and it’s visuals are elevated by the stunning soundtrack. Otomo not only had a clear idea of what futuristic Tokyo looked like, he also knew how it should sound – or at least, he had the right people for the job. Akira’s score was provided by Geinoh Yamashirogumi, a musical collective consisting of hundreds of members from a wide range of backgrounds, whose performances integrated elements of ancient folk music with modern technology and influences. The end result is something that sounds both tribal and futuristic, wholly otherworldly – as fitting for biker gangs brawling over territory as it is for apocalyptic cataclysm.
Like Blade Runner, Akira’s vision of the future is so profoundly influential that it seems to be paid homage to more often than it is borrowed from. The so called “Akira Slide” has become to animators as the Wilhelm Scream is for sound designers, and Kaneda’s iconic skid to a halt has been done dozens of time over, not just in anime and action cartoons, or even just with two-wheeled vehicles – It’s shown up in everything from Pokémon to Paw Patrol. It got a nod from Pixar in Luca, and Jordan Peele even gave it the live-action treatment in Nope – which was also what he said when approached about helming the live-action Akira movie that’s been getting kicked around Hollywood since I was a sophomore in high school.
Ninja Scroll
Ani-Mainstream
Speaking of awkward formative years, in the early to mid-’90s, anime began trickling into the mainstream from the murky depths of stores like Suncoast Video and Tower Records. There, you’d usually find a shelf of something called “Japanimation,” a wall of mysterious tapes, many of which were adorned with phrases like “Parental Advisory Suggested” or “For Mature Audiences.” This of course made them all the more enticing to the burgeoning proto-weeaboo community. In hindsight, a lot of the movies that lined these shelves are hilariously bad, and even aside from the painfully low bar for English language dubbing at the time, it’s apparent that a lot of American distributors were scooping up the rights to any bubble-era OVA that had enough blood and boobies to warrant the “ADULT” label – but there were plenty of exceptions. Akira and Ghost in the Shell are both standout films in their own right, anime or otherwise, but if there’s one film that feels especially representative of the early anime zeitgeist, it’s Ninja Scroll.
A feudal Japanese dark-fantasy tale at its core, its setting and plot are secondary to its style, and it absolutely oozes style. Okay, maybe gushes is a better word – but regardless, its fight scenes are brutal, gratifyingly gruesome, and best of all, imaginative. Compared to a live-action martial arts film, the possibilities of an animated one are virtually limitless, and Ninja Scroll pushes those boundaries.
Ninja Scroll is the brainchild of Yoshiaki Kawajiri, and everything I just said also applies to his other work like Vampire Hunter D, Wicked City and Demon City Shinjuku, all of which boast comparable levels of aesthetically-pleasing, exploitative subject matter. As lovely as it is when animation is used to portray the beauty of nature and the subtle nuances of complex characters, sometimes you just want a good old-fashioned kickass anime movie with ultra-violent fights, gross-ass monsters, and maybe some sexy ladies and/or dudes.
Princess Mononoke
The Whole Miyazaki
Curmudgeonly godfather of Japanese animation Hayao Miyazaki has had harsh words about the more pervasive tropes in anime, and his work typically veers in a non-violent direction. Many of his films manage to have conflict without a conventional villain. In My Neighbor Totoro, the bad guy is either tuberculosis, or the goat that tries to eat Mai’s corn.
That said, when Miyazaki has decided to flex on the action front, he doesn’t disappoint. His feature directorial debut, The Castle of Cogliostro, set an extremely high bar for the many Lupin III adaptations that have followed. His post-apocalyptic magnum opus, Nausicaa: The Valley of the Wind, is an epic in its own right, both as an 1100-page manga that he wrote and drew himself, and as the feature film adaptation he directed. Oh, and fun fact: Miyazaki was such good pals with Moebius that the French artist actually named his daughter Nausicaa. Maybe Miyazaki has a box turtle named Arzach or something. But in terms of action, Studio Ghibli’s finest work is Princess Mononoke.
A visually staggering fantasy epic set in Japan’s Muromachi period, it has similar themes to many of Miyazaki’s other films, from believable human characters juxtaposed with whimsical folklore to a palpable adoration of nature from the smallest blade of grass to every cloud drifting across the perfect Studio Ghibli blue sky. But Princess Mononoke is also packed with intense fight scenes, epic battles, and some truly gruesome moments. It’s rare to find a movie that strikes as much of a balance between beauty and horror.
Anecdotally, it’s worth pointing out that Princess Mononoke seems to have been a pretty major influence on some of the best video games ever made. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was revealed with a hero in a blue tunic battling a tentacled monstrosity on horseback, and corrupted boars are a common problem. The Kodama tree spirits are likely distant cousins of Hyrule’s myriad Koroks, and of course, Tears of the Kingdom has Link getting new powers from his possessed forearm.
Elden Ring’s magical steadfast mount Torrent is a dead ringer for Yakul the red elk, and the Elden Beast has some very similar bioluminescent mythological DNA to the Forest Spirit’s final form. This could all be coincidental, like the fact that Elden Ring is directed by a different Miyazaki – Hidetaka, no relation – or it could be a testament to how much of a cultural impact Hayao Miyazaki’s film had.
Princess Mononoke feels like an especially important piece of animation in that it saw anime go from something in the back corner of Suncoast Video to something at the forefront of mainstream pop-culture. In some small part, this is thanks to its creators having some oversight in its Western distribution.
As legend has it, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein met with Hayao Miyazaki to discuss the film’s stateside release, and proceeded to bombard the animator with demands to make changes to cater to American audiences. In response, Studio Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki brought Weinstein a replica samurai sword as a gift. While presenting it to him in a room full of Miramax board members, he loudly stated, “NO CUTS.” The moral of the story: Totoro and Ponyo might belie a cuddly demeanor for Miyazaki and company, but Princess Mononoke and threatening Harvey Weinstein with a katana is proof that Studio Ghibli does not f#ck around.
Redline
Speed, Dammit. More Speed
In pop-culture, the term “action” is usually synonymous with violence, be it swordfights, shoot-outs, explosions, fisticuffs, etc – but there’s also speed, which is possibly the purest form of action in filmmaking. Edward Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion,” is debatably the first film ever made – and it conveys a sense of speed. It was just a guy riding a horse, but that’s a non-stop thrill ride compared to some of its snoozefest contemporaries, which included telescope footage of planet Venus and white people trying to dance in a garden.
Speed is fun to watch, and car chases are practically ubiquitous in action movies. From early examples like Bullitt and The French Connection to modern gas-guzzlers like Mad Max: Fury Road as well as the prolific and very literally titled Fast franchise, car chases are clearly not going anywhere… I mean, they are, otherwise the cars would be stationary, but you get the idea.
A car chase doesn’t necessarily need to have cars, or even have them chasing each other; it just needs a bunch of stuff moving fast in the same direction, like The Phantom Menace’s Pod Race, for instance. Speed especially shines in animation, whether it’s Wile Etherbert Coyote’s comical and fruitless crusade to murder that goddamn Road Runner, or Speed Racer’s living up to his career-informing namesake by racing… speedily. If you combined every example of awesome high-speed action I just namechecked, you’d have Redline.
Takeshi Koike’s 2009 feature film debut shows what it looks like when animation – if you’ll pardon the expression – is running on all cylinders. The action is so absurdly over-the-top that the plot is slammed squarely into the back seat from pure momentum. It focuses on intergalactic racing and the criminal meddling and political intrigue that happen off the track. The fun is in the journey, not the destination. So, if you were disappointed that the Fast and Furious’s foray into space was just that Pontiac Fiero test drive, or have been praying Lucasfilm would announced Watto & Sebulba: A Star Wars Story, this is your movie. Redline is an utterly bonkers masterpiece.
While we’re on the subject, here’s one incredibly esoteric detail that I need to put out into the ether – one of the main characters’ cars bears a resemblance to H.R. Giger’s unused concept art for the Batman Forever Batmobile, which I would normally write off as a coincidence if not for that fact that she uses that car to run another car off the road that is unquestionably a nod to the 1995 Batmobile. Also? Takeshi Koiki contributed one of the better shorts to the Batman-ime anthology, Gotham Knight.
The least fast thing about Redline was the seven years it took to get made. Produced by Madhouse, the studio that gave us Ninja Scroll, one big reason it’s so ridiculously fun to look at is that it’s predominantly hand-drawn. It took over 100,000 cels, coupled with modern digital techniques, to make Redline. So, of course, after all that work, it was a commercial flop. This is why we can’t have nice things.
The Incredibles
Computer Animation
Enough has been said about how much Pixar’s use of computer animation revolutionized the entire animation industry and gave Disney a run for its money. Er, it would’ve, if Disney hadn’t scooped the company up right away. Generally, Pixar movies have a simple, high concept hook like what if toys came to life when no one’s looking or what if fish were negligent parents or what if a movie with a talking dog made adult men weep uncontrollably, but the studio’s first superhero movie is what earns it a spot on this list, with The Incredibles.
The Incredibles came at a time when we didn’t get a new one of those every 10 minutes, and it’s remained hard to top. To this day, I maintain this is the best Watchmen movie and the best Fantastic Four movie we’ve gotten, exploring the vulnerable human side of a superpowered family in a society where crime-fighting is outlawed.
It might not have Rorschach maiming a guy with deep-fryer oil, but its action sequences are on par with any big budget blockbuster cape movie – in many cases, eclipsing them, because despite being 100% CGI, every minuscule movement in The Incredibles has weight to it. Even the mundane moments are deliberately choreographed with a level of palpable realism, which in turn sells the grander spectacles. Bob Parr’s scuffle with his economy sedan is a great slapstick vignette, comically juxtaposing his superpowers against a very mortal frustration, but it also establishes just how strong he is in relation to objects we’re all familiar with, so when he’s beating the crap out of a giant robot, there’s a gravity to it. The Incredibles is surprisingly credible.
Bad superhero action has the tendency to feel like a kid bashing a couple of action figures together to make them fight, so it’s not surprising that the studio that figured out how to bring toys to life was also able to make a solid family film that also had its fair share of deftly choreographed action sequences. Equally unsurprising is that Incredibles director Brad Bird was able to apply his talent for fast-paced sequences and breathtaking setpieces to live-action in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, marking that series’ arrival as the blockbuster popcorn mega-franchise it is today. Still, Tom Cruise’s most elaborate and potentially suicidal stunts are great, but they’ll never be as much fun as giant robots or a super-powered baby.
And there you have it, the 10 best animated action movies of all time, or at the very least, a mixtape of greatest hits with a few killer B-sides thrown in the mix for good measure. What movies would you add to this list? Share your favorites in the comments!
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