Top 5 Animation Movies: Honorable Mentions

This was a tough category. I've seen a ton of animated movies, but how do I rank them, as they're all so different? To keep it fair, I limited myself to only one Pixar in the top 5, and 2 Disney movies (as Disney has been making movies since before I was born, and was essentially the only animation company making full length animation films at the time of my birth, it gets two). With those restrictions, I had several great movies that wouldn't fit. So here are my honorable mentions:

Toy Story 1 + 2

Yes, it's two movies, but I'm counting it as one. This was the first Pixar movie I'd ever seen, and I had never seen anything like it. The animation was great, yes, but it was more about the plot and the characters. It was almost like the new kind of animation freed up the writers to create an engaging story with real stakes, and characters with actual personalities.



It was funny and sweet, and as someone who had grown out of playing with toys, I felt a sense of nostalgia and sadness, thinking of them packed away somewhere, or even thrown away.

The first Toy Story film set a new bar for animation, one that Disney could not meet with its traditional animation films, which had been coming out every summer since before I was 6. The second Toy Story film was nearly as good as the first, which is rare with sequels. You could see character development (or non-development, as it were), and the passage of time, something that Disney didn't know how to do with its sequels. I had grown out of Disney, but thanks to Pixar and its childlike story that adults could enjoy, so had many children. Thus began the Age of Pixar, of which there is no end in sight. Alternate Choice: Monsters, Inc. I freaking loved Monsters, Inc, but I couldn't justify putting another Pixar film on my honorable mentions list.

Oliver and Company

This film has the distinction of being the first film I remember seeing in the theaters, at age 6. I loved it, and waited for it to come out on video, which it didn't. Disney decided against releasing it, and it didn't make an appearance on video until 1996, and DVD until 2002. Regardless of Disney's fuck-ups, this remains one of the best animated talking animals films ever. The cast is a who's who of late 80s stars, and the music is sensational.



The movie is an adaptation of the Dickens novel Oliver Twist, and stars Oliver, an adorable ginger kitty, who gets lost in New York City. While his owner, a young girl, is looking for him, he befriends some street dogs who take him in and care for him. I am actually amazed that I don't own it yet. For shame, me! Alternate Choice: None. Upon viewing films from Disney's traditionally animated features canon from 1989-1996 (the period during which they had a new animated release every summer, each of which featured intense marketing and merchandising campaigns), few of them hold up. Out of Oliver and Company, The Little Mermaid, Rescuers Down Under, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan, and Tarzan, things start to fall apart at Pocahontas, and all the films following that didn't get the reviews or success that those in late 80s and early 90s did. The Lion King was the peak -- it also happened to come out the year before Pixar would release Toy Story, which precipitated the decline in Disney's traditionally animated features (starting with Pocahontas in 1995). Unfathomably, Disney would continue to release only traditionally animated features until 2005, ten years after Toy Story. As of today, Disney has released only two computer animated films, and has four more planned for release in the next five years. But if its first two efforts, Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons, are any indication, I wouldn't expect greatness.