The latest from Pixar takes an energetic but ultimately tender and sympathetic trip through the mind of a young girl experiencing traumatic life transitions.

The last movie currently on the Studio Ghibli docket, Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s gorgeous feature about an asthmatic girl who meets a strange friend in the country shows the animation house continuing to raise the bar on lavish, detailed imagery. 

As usual, animator Bill Plympton uses wildly expressionistic pencil visuals and an episodic storyline to tell this story of jealousy and betrayal.

An outcast alien and an outcast human learn to overcome their differences in this second-tier DreamWorks production, which concerns perhaps the friendliest alien invasion in cinema history. 

The 1978 animated adaptation of Richard Adams’ bestselling rabbit fantasy is a labor of love from a first-time director with no animation experience.

After Sleeping Beauty, feature animation was looking too time-consuming and expensive for Disney to continue, but technology came to the rescue with this charmer, leading the studio to a profitable new era. 

A trippy show for kids and stoners returns to theaters after more than a decade away, having given the kid-fans time to become stoner-fans.

The behind-the-scenes story of how this animated musical came to fruition is more compelling than the movie, which runs A Midsummer Night’s Dream and George Lucas’ original ideas through a convoluted plot and watered-down pop songs.

Tomm Moore’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated The Secret Of Kells is an even more beautiful and personal animated adventure that’s drawn from Irish history and the legend of the “selkies.” 

A Madagascar spin-off shines the spotlight on a bunch of comical penguins in search of Cheese Dibbles.

The French animated fable that inspired a generation of animators—particularly Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata—has finally made its weird, eerie way to American screens.

Disney reconfigures a relatively obscure Marvel comic into a hugely satisfying animated superhero movie, one that’s in step with current trends while also feeling unique and separate. 

Greek myth meets Mexican myth in this anarchic animated feature, which covers up a predictable story with bright colors and wild energy.

Based on a Japanese folktale about a girl born from a bamboo shoot and the elderly, childless couple that raises her, Isao Takahata’s lyrical new Studio Ghibli gem has animation so gorgeous, any given frame could pass for a masterwork. 

This painfully minor Walt Disney adaptation doubles as a study in how pros handle mild family fare. 

Following Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella, Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is the weakest of his fairy-tale princess movies narratively, but remains the most beautiful movie the studio ever made. 

Mamoru Oshii’s anime science-fiction classic takes place in a future where people can have their consciousnesses projected into a cybernetic body. Get past the tech-speak, and it’s a fascinating, beautiful speculative fiction.

Packed with complicated, charming gimcrackery, the latest stop-motion-animated whimsy from Laika, home of Coraline and ParaNorman, follows the adventures of quirky cavern-dwelling creatures that live in discarded boxes. 

This 1959 feature, the first Japanese animated film imported to America, has its pros and cons, but the bare-bones U.S. home-video release is strictly a con.

The Cars spin-off franchise gets a mercenary sequel that abandons racing in favor of a plot about sentient planes joining forces to combat a wildfire. Cue shameless homage to real-life environmental responders.