Now, now, I know what you’re thinking. I mean come on, animated film? Isn’t that stuff for kids? I’ll have you know that I enjoy animated films as just as much as I do live action. It’s an entirely different genre of movies where the real stars are not the characters, but the artists. The following are, in my opinion, the top five films, based on artistry and the overall excellence of the movie.
- The Prince of Egypt-
This retelling of the story of Moses combined beautiful scenery, talented voices and an amazing soundtrack to make, what I think is the best animated movie I have seen. The excellent reconstruction of ancient Egypt made for a most breath-taking rollercoaster ride of emotions from the gentle scenes of baby Moses in the basket to the chilling ten plagues. There also was a star studded cast of voices including Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfieffer, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Patrick Stewart, Martin Short, Steve Martin, Danny Glover and Helen Mirren. The soundtrack was also very original, making ’’The Prince of Egypt’’ the most powerful and well-made animated film I have ever seen.
- The Lion King
This is definetly a timeless movie, wonderfully made, brilliantly original and strikingly real. The animals in this movie were studied in real life by the animators to make the character’s movements as real as possible. It includes the voices of James Earl Jones, Matthew Broderick, Whoopi Goldberg, Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Nathan Lane.
An interesting piece of trivia, Sally Dworsky, who was the singing voice of Nala in ’’The Lion King’’ was also the singing voice of Miriam in ’’The Prince of Egypt’’.
3.The Emperor’s New Groove
There’s not too much to say about this one, its music and animation is good, I just found it one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. David Spade does the voice of the Emperor and he is hilarious. John Goodman also voices. The animators apparantly remembered that there are some things you just can’t do in live action movies that you can do with animation. So they threw all caution to the wind and made a genuinely funny movie. This movie apart from being great and original fun, also teaches a valuable lesson about selfishness.
- Toy Story
Toy Story was a ground breaking animated film that lead to the newest kind of animation using computer effects. The quality was amazing and it was the closest thing to being real that people had seen up to that point. Even if it wasn’t, this movie would still be good. It has the voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Jim Varney and Annie Potts for one thing, and it forges ahead into new territory raising the question ’’What if toys really could come alive?’’. It’s every little kids fantasy for his toys to be real, and this movie lets the kids dream a little. We can all identify with one or two of the toys in the movie, we’ve probably owned a couple toys when we were young that meant a lot to us. ’’Toy Story’’ lets us remember, it makes us feel young again.
- Tarzan
This movie also broke new ground with it’s new kind of filming, something hard to explain but very fun to watch. Tarzan also has an excellent soundtrack and very good songs written by Phil Collins. It features the voices of Glenn Close, Minnie Driver, Rosie O’Donnell, Nigel Hawthorne, Tony Goldwyn and Wayne Knight.
There you have it, the best(in my opinion, and feel free to disagree) five animated films made.