In the meantime, we have these astounding works, as good an argument for the power of animation as any other.īelle is already anime superstar Mamoru Hosoda’s highest-grossing film, and that’s before it even hits theaters in the U.S. (Five of our favorites are from Japan and three others from Europe.) Our hope for 2022 is that major American entertainment companies come to appreciate animation as an art form of astonishing breadth and depth and not simply a cash cow for lazy sitcoms and the milking of preexisting IPs. The ten best animated titles of 2021 were almost entirely creator driven and - perhaps unsurprisingly, considering that our country’s film and television industries’ most hallowed taste-making bodies still tend to see the medium as an afterthought - almost entirely foreign made. This year’s best animated films and television series were astoundingly diverse, from a form-busting documentary about the immigrant and queer experience centered on real-world tragedies, to an experimental limited-series anime preoccupied with remarkably abstract and dense existential musings.

So it’s no surprise that 2021 was a year as rich in remarkable animation as any in recent memory, even if most of the year’s animated output began production long before lockdowns commenced. As the coronavirus pandemic raged on last year, animation proved to be as close to the ideal medium for remote production as the moving-pictures industry is likely to get.

Adult animation movies download