The best anime movies of all time are not a niche within cinema — they are some of the greatest films ever made, full stop. The five below are the ones every fan should see at least once: a body-swap romance, two Ghibli masterpieces, a story of guilt and redemption, and the cyberpunk landmark that changed science fiction forever. Start with Your Name, the highest-grossing anime film of its era and the perfect entry point.
The Modern Classic: Your Name
Your Name (2016) is the rare film that is both a box-office phenomenon and a critical darling. Makoto Shinkai’s film, rated 8.5 on TMDB and running 1h 46m, follows Taki Tachibana, voiced by Ryunosuke Kamiki, and Mitsuha Miyamizu, voiced by Mone Kamishiraishi, two teenagers who begin swapping bodies and leaving each other notes — until the connection breaks and one of them must cross time itself to restore it. Set partly in the town of Itomori, it streams on HBO Max in the US, and its final act is one of the most satisfying payoffs in modern film.
Ghibli’s Crown Jewels: Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke
Spirited Away (2001) is the film that introduced the world to Studio Ghibli. Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece, rated 8.5 on TMDB, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and remains the only hand-drawn, non-English-language film to do so. A girl trapped working in a bathhouse for spirits, it is endlessly inventive and endlessly rewatchable. Princess Mononoke (1997) is its darker sibling: rated 8.3, it pits a cursed prince against warring gods and humans in a forest on the edge of destruction, and it remains Miyazaki’s most morally complex film — nobody is simply good or evil.
The Heartbreakers: A Silent Voice and Akira
A Silent Voice (2016) is the most emotionally direct film on this list: a story of bullying, guilt and the long road to redemption, centred on Shoya and the deaf girl he once tormented. It is the film most likely to make you cry, and the one most likely to change how you think about forgiveness. Akira (1988) is the opposite kind of landmark: Katsuhiro Otomo’s film, rated 7.9 and running 2h 4m, stars Mitsuo Iwata as Shotaro Kaneda and Nozomu Sasaki as Tetsuo Shima in a Neo-Tokyo set in 2019, where a biker gang, a secret government project and a boy with godlike power collide. It streams on Crunchyroll, and its animation still puts most modern films to shame.
Why Animation Deserves the Big Screen
What these five films share is a belief that animation can do things live action cannot. Spirited Away builds a world that could never be built on a set; Akira renders a city in apocalyptic detail that no camera could capture; Your Name turns a comet and a red thread into the most romantic image of the decade. Animation is not a genre and it is not a shortcut — it is a medium that gives filmmakers total control over light, colour and movement, and these films use that control to tell stories that feel larger than life precisely because they are drawn.
How to Watch Them
Watch Your Name first for pure emotional craft, then Spirited Away for wonder and Princess Mononoke for weight. Save A Silent Voice for a night when you are ready to feel something, and Akira for when you want to see where modern science fiction began. Together, these five films cover the full range of what anime cinema can do — and every one of them earns its place on a list of the best films of all time, animated or otherwise.
For cast details and where to stream it, see our full Your Name guide.
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