10 great animated fantasy films

Fantasy has been in the blood of animation since its early days. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Hollywood’s first feature-length animated film, kicked off Disney’s tradition of translating European (and later, global) fairytales for young movie-goers, and vibrant, fantastical folklore has been a good fit for the expressive freedoms of the animation medium ever since. The most unique and timeless fantasy animations feel like the hand-drawn illustrations from a treasured storybook have come to life.

Few fantasy worlds have had a larger impact on the genre than Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and fans of Peter Jackson’s monumental live-action trilogy can enjoy a return to Middle Earth’s Third Age in anime form, with Japanese director Kenji Kamiyama’s new tale of Rohan’s fight against an army of Dunlendings. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is the first Tolkien animated film in some time, but Ralph Bakshi adapted the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings for animation in 1978, while Arthur Rankin Jr and Jules Bass brought The Hobbit and The Return of the King to television in 1977 and 1980. 

While The War of the Rohirrim breaks new ground with an anime vision of Middle Earth, it builds on a rich history of epic fantastical worlds that artists have expressed in hand-drawn, computer-generated and stop-motion styles. If the battle for Rohan whets your appetite for more animated fantasy, here are 10 films that paint vivid, exciting adventures.

Director: Ralph Bakshi

A true animation iconoclast, Ralph Bakshi divided his career between seedy, explicit, countercultural crime films, namely Fritz the Cat (1972), and wild interpretations of fantasy archetypes where limited resources contend with his bonanza ambitions. A year before his landmark but compromised The Lord of the Rings adaptation, Bakshi’s first fantasy film packs broad comic relief (not least in its doddery good wizard), pin-up model fairy designs and blunt invocations of the Third Reich’s propaganda machine into a brisk 80-minute film. After nuclear Armageddon, barbarous mutants are compelled by a fascist, industrial wizard to eradicate the planet’s true ancestors – fairies, elves and magical creatures. 

The fluidity of the character movement and the accented, unconventional vocal performances make Wizards a lively, disjointed and fascinating cultural object. Bakshi’s film was released three months before Star Wars; the latter film would redefine the scope and financial ambition of Hollywood films thereafter, while films as abrupt and polemical as Wizards all but disappeared from studio portfolios.

Director: Marcell Jankovics

After receiving an Oscar nomination for his animated short film Sisyphus (1974), Marcell Jankovics adapted a legend of ancient Hunnic, Avaric and Hungarian societies for this landmark Hungarian animated feature in which the fantastically strong offspring of a mare stages a battle against the three dragons who have kidnapped the kingdom’s princesses. 

Son of the White Mare consists of constantly morphing, vibrant visuals which often shift into explicit or militaristic imagery. Painted with a Goethe-inspired colour scheme, the animation is often described as psychedelic, but there’s an underlying coherence to Jankovics’s vision of the cycles of folklore repeating on a large historical canvas. It’s a truly remarkable feat of translating legend to moving image that loses none of folklore’s strangeness and charm.

Directors: Arthur Rankin Jr and Jules Bass

Best-known for such stop-motion television specials as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment rarely experimented with theatrical releases, and the commercial disappointment of this version of Peter S. Beagle’s novel seemed to confirm that TV was a safer space for their animated projects. But although audiences largely stayed away, The Last Unicorn has since developed a cult reputation.

As well as being an affecting allegory for humanity’s possessive vices, the story of a unicorn searching for more of her kind commands the senses with vibrant colours, character designs and movement. This was courtesy of Tokyo studio Topcraft, whose animators would soon be working on Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind (1984) and later founded Studio Ghibli (Rankin/Bass outsourced nearly all their animation, an uncommon practice for Western producers at the time). Complementing the visual craft are sweeping, melancholic songs by Jimmy Webb in the vein of Art Garfunkel’s ‘Bright Eyes’ in Watership Down (1978).

Director: Mamoru Oshii 

A particularly beguiling product of the OVA (Original Video Animation) boom in 1980s Japan, this “Dying Earth” fantasy has eluded easy interpretation since it was released on direct-to-video formats nearly 40 years ago. A ghostly, hollowed-out world is home to only a few beings: a young, angelic girl protecting a mysterious, treasured egg, and a young man carrying a cross-shaped rifle like a post-apocalyptic shepherd (plus appearances from shadowy, airborne fish). 

In just 70 minutes, Mamoru Oshii (the future director of 1995’s Ghost in the Shell) and artist Yoshitaka Amano conjure a powerful mood of melancholy and dread, invoking Biblical symbolism and forcing us to observe the empty rituals and hopeless sorrow of living in a half-world. With minimal dialogue and extremely patient shots of characters against still, desolate backdrops, Angel’s Egg transports us to a fantastical zone where life has been all but forgotten, where only the impulses of its two (often glowing) inhabitants can decide its fate – leading to devastating results.

Director: Richard Williams

Richard Williams’s ill-fated and incomplete masterpiece boasts some of the finest hand-drawn animation in the medium, one of the longest production times of any film, and one of the most painful stories of studio interference in the past century. 

The Oscar-winning Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) animator envisioned a folktale-inspired Arabian fantasy about a street thief and a simple cobbler jeopardising and eventually saving a prosperous Golden City. After losing control of the ambitious production when he couldn’t complete it in time to compete with Disney’s Aladdin (1992), Williams watched two butchered, commercially redesigned edits of his project go on release in the 90s (The Princess and the Cobbler by Allied Filmmakers, Arabian Knight by Miramax). Thanks to the arduous restoration work by artists such as Garrett Gilchrist (his Recobbled Cut is archived on YouTube), we can see as full a glimpse as possible of Williams’s remarkable, transportive fantasy.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Often championed as Studio Ghibli’s best film, Princess Mononoke is a staggering achievement for both the fantasy genre and the animation medium, also setting a new benchmark for the artistic synthesis of Hayao Miyazaki’s unshakable anti-war and pro-environment beliefs. The eponymous princess is an elemental, supernatural wolf rider on a mission to rebuke humanity for contaminating the natural world with their warmongering, industrial footprint, which is also the indirect cause for a corrupted spirit wrecking horror-tinged destruction on nearby villages. 

Just as the fantasy epic interlinks different types of large-scale human violence, Princess Mononoke merged traditional hand-drawn animation with 3D rendering to help realise the most rapid and complex movement. It’s one of many reasons why this ambitious and arresting fantasy is such a major event in Ghibli history.

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Just as David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021) later retold a Middle English tale with deliberate subversion and expanded psychological detail, this 2007 film finds director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriters Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman questioning the assumed heroism of Beowulf. Their macabre and playfully psychosexual adaptation of the famous Old English poem uncovers a more sinister, human evil.

It wasn’t the only ambitious element of Zemeckis’s vision. Live-action performances were translated into animation with motion-capture technology, giving Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie and other top-tier talent a more concrete presence than simply lending their voices. The big swings of Beowulf and occasional resemblance to PlayStation cutscenes are symptoms of the trends it was chasing, following epics such as The Lord of the Rings, Troy (2004) and 300 (2006). It was a decade of giddy, anachronistic use of technology in grimdark, grown-up fantasies with origins in myth and the ancient past.

Director: Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña

This marvel of independent stop-motion uses a mix of different materials (paint, clay, puppets, and more) to explore how surrealism and fantasy can be co-opted by abusive systems to enforce rules and borders, conditioning and imprisoning their victims’ understanding of the world. Hiding from a fearsome wolf in an abandoned house, María Wehrle (Amalia Kassai) discovers a place where reality frays and peels like loose wallpaper and reshapes itself in response to her inner, conflicted emotions, all while the dread of the approaching wolf (Rainer Krause) invades anywhere that the cult escapee considers safe. 

At face value, The Wolf House uses the language and mechanics of fairytale to propagandise the consequences of defying the authority of an isolationist, oppressive ‘colony’. On a deeper level, Chilean animators Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña use the instructional voice of propaganda parables to unearth the anguish and resistance that victims of cults and dictators can rarely directly voice. 

Director: Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart

2020 may have been short on big-scale fantasy epics, but the pandemic-affected market meant that some streaming titles drew more attention than they might have in a standard, crowded market. No breakout hit deserved it more than Cartoon Saloon’s blend of Irish history and folklore.

The Kilkenny-based Irish animation studio (who have now been robbed of the best animated feature Oscar four times) used Oliver Cromwell’s colonial campaign of Irish pacification as a backdrop for a heartwarming tale about the true wildlings of rural Ireland, the shapeshifting ‘Wolfwalkers’. The friendship between Wolfwalker Mebh (Eva Whittaker) and English newcomer Robyn (Honor Kneafsey) is charged with childlike defiance and excitement, but for every humanisation of the ‘othered’, Robyn and Mebh reckon with the violence of authority in an unnecessarily divided world. The enthusiastic, richly accented voice cast guides us through textured, carefully painted natural spaces where everything feels tangibly alive and bristling with rebellion.

Directors: Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson

After winning best director at the 2018 Academy Awards for The Shape of Water, beloved Mexican genre filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has been on a hot streak of passion projects – remaking carnival noirs, becoming a horror host and, having been influenced by Mary Shelley’s landmark novel for most of his career, will release his version of Frankenstein next year. Amid it all came this stop-motion take on the classic Italian children’s novel by Carlo Collodi.

The beautifully animated fantasy, co-directed with the late Mark Gustafson (The Adventures of Mark Twain, Fantastic Mr. Fox), aligns with so many of del Toro’s creative motifs: a stylised account of real history, childhood wonder used as an ill-fitting shield against the barbarity of the world, and the supernatural intervening to mend wounds in fraught found families. Pinocchio refuses easy classification as an animation for children or adults – the musical numbers and broad humour sits alongside existential themes and confronting images, and the tension between them leads to an imaginative and cathartic finale.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is in cinemas, including BFI IMAX, from 13 December.