The 20 Best Anime Movies of All Time

The best anime movies of all time are Spirited Away (2001), Your Name (2016), Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Akira (1988) and Perfect Blue (1997). If you've never watched anime before, start with Spirited Away or Your Name — both are self-contained, visually stunning and need no genre knowledge at all.

Anime film is not a genre — it's a medium carrying every genre at once. The same format gives you a gentle children's fable about a forest spirit, a cyberpunk body-horror epic, and one of the most despairing war films ever made. The list below spans all of it, sorted so you can find your entry point without getting lost.

Studio Ghibli — the essentials

The most reliable studio in animation history. Almost anything here works as a first watch.

• Spirited Away (2001) — a girl's parents are transformed and she must work in a bathhouse for spirits to save them. Won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and remains the peak of the medium.
• Princess Mononoke (1997) — an ecological war epic with no villains, only competing survivals. Ghibli's most adult film.
• My Neighbor Totoro (1988) — almost plotless, entirely wonderful. Two sisters, a sick mother, and a forest spirit. The gentlest film on this list.
• Grave of the Fireflies (1988) — two orphaned siblings in the final months of WWII. Devastating, essential, and you will only watch it once.
• Howl's Moving Castle (2004) — a young woman cursed into old age takes shelter in a walking castle. Messy and enchanting.
• The Boy and the Heron (2023) — Miyazaki's late-career return, and a strange, personal film about grief. Also an Oscar winner.

Makoto Shinkai — the modern romantics

Impossibly beautiful skies, long distances, and near-misses.

• Your Name (2016) — two teenagers inexplicably swap bodies, and the film turns into something much bigger. A global phenomenon and the best entry point for newcomers who want a story rather than a fable.
• Weathering With You (2019) — a runaway meets a girl who can clear the sky. Same emotional wavelength.
• Suzume (2022) — a road movie about closing doors that release disasters. Shinkai's most adventurous.
• 5 Centimetres Per Second (2007) — three short chapters about drifting apart. Only 63 minutes and quietly brutal.

Satoshi Kon — the psychological deep end

Kon died far too young, having made four features that no one has matched.

• Perfect Blue (1997) — a pop idol turns actress and loses the boundary between performance, stalker and self. Nightmarish, and a direct influence on live-action thrillers for decades since.
• Paprika (2006) — therapists enter patients' dreams via a device that gets stolen. The clearest ancestor of Inception, and it makes the dream imagery look effortless.
• Millennium Actress (2001) — a documentary crew interviews an ageing star, and her memories and films merge. Formally dazzling and deeply moving.
• Tokyo Godfathers (2003) — three homeless people find an abandoned baby on Christmas Eve. Warm, funny and the most accessible Kon film.

Sci-fi, cyberpunk and action

• Akira (1988) — biker gangs, psychic experiments and a neo-Tokyo on the brink. The film that introduced most of the West to anime, and its animation is still staggering.
• Ghost in the Shell (1995) — a cyborg officer questions what's left of her humanity. Enormously influential on The Matrix and everything after it.
• Redline (2009) — seven years of hand-drawn animation for a pure adrenaline race movie. No message, all velocity.
• Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (2020) — a franchise film, but a blockbuster phenomenon and genuinely gorgeous action. Watch the series first.

The modern heart-breakers

• A Silent Voice (2016) — a former bully tries to make amends with the deaf classmate he tormented. Handles guilt and depression with real care.
• Wolf Children (2012) — a single mother raises two children who are part wolf. A film about parenting that sneaks up on you completely.

Animation isn't a genre for children. It's the only medium where a filmmaker can put anything at all on screen — and anime is the tradition that took that seriously.

The best anime movies for beginners

If you're starting from zero, here's a five-film run that builds naturally:

• 1. Spirited Away — universally loved, no prerequisites, and it shows you what the medium can do.
• 2. Your Name — modern, romantic and propulsive. This is usually the one that converts people.
• 3. A Silent Voice — grounded, emotional, no fantasy element.
• 4. Princess Mononoke — now something with real weight and moral complexity.
• 5. Perfect Blue or Akira — the deep end, once you've stopped thinking of animation as a children's format.

Save Grave of the Fireflies for a day when you're emotionally robust. It's one of the greatest films ever made and it is not an evening's entertainment.

Sub or dub?

Both are defensible here. Ghibli's English dubs are unusually good — well cast and carefully supervised — so they're a fine way in if subtitles are a barrier. For Kon's films and Akira, go subtitled: the sound design and vocal performance are doing more work than the dubs can carry.

Where should you start?

One answer: Spirited Away. If you want something more contemporary and romantic, Your Name. And if you've already seen the famous ones and want to know what the medium is really capable of, go straight to Perfect Blue.

If Paprika hooked you, our mind-bending movies list is the natural next stop, and the best Korean movies covers the other great non-English tradition worth your time. Search any of these in N Mirror to build your watchlist.