AFI's Top 10 Animated Films

Besides me who else thought from looking at the introduction of the AFI special that The Incredibles would had made the list of top animated films of all time?
 
I totally understand this list and for the most part I agree with it. Ask your average Joe Sixpack to spout off a few of what he thinks are the best animated features. You'd be lucky to get anything other than Shrek and a whole bunch of Disney/Pixar films. That's just the way it is.
 
If it makes you feel any better, you can just change the list title to "Animated Children's Movies." It's not very much better defined as a genre than "Animation," if you look at it hard (you can have children's action, children's mystery, children's comedy, etc), but that is a better defined genre and the list of winners doesn't need to change.



I think they manage to do that every time they release any of their "Top N" lists. Still, they do provide fodder for people to discuss, and I can't exactly get too huffy at them for excluding things I happen to like (ahem ;)).

So, here's a question for you all. AFI made 10 top 10 lists of "genre" films. The genres they picked (minus animation) were:

Fantasy
Gangster
Science Fiction
Western
Sports
Mystery
Romantic Comedy
Courtroom Drama
Epic

Looking at those lists, I'm going to be honestly hard pressed to find a place to drop their picks of top 10 animated films without essentially dominating "Fantasy" or "Science Fiction." Even if I bend the rules outside the AMERICAN Film Institute's charter and start going international, I have to go to Japan to start finding animated sports movies and straight-up romantic comedy. Westerns and mysteries are radically under-represented in animation. I can't think of a gangster or courtroom drama animated movie at all (and that they put To Kill a Mockingbird at #1 shows that they do have some taste).

For all our insistence that animation is a medium and not a genre, it is still a medium that is being used for an extremely narrow field of genres, even in the places that supposedly regard animation more highly as a filmmaking tool. I also think that the list of animated films that can really compete among the body of live-action work would be incredibly small, and attempting to do so would inadvertently marginalize animation even further. If nothing else, the law of averages is far weighted against animation in that kind of head-to-head comparison, since there are so many more people working in live-action and so many more live-action films made. Insisting on animation's first-class status as a medium and not a genre just stacks the deck against them very heavily.

I'm sure there's something to be learned from all this, although I'm not really positive what it is yet. It certainly does put the Best Animated Feature Oscar in a different light.

-- Ed
 
The Iron Giant being omitted from this list = equal automatic failing at life (I think...I never actually got around to watching the NIMH movie). Again, The Iron Giant. The frikken Giant. It was the best animated movie ever made. No, the best movie ever made, period. But maybe I just think that because it was the first animated movie I ever saw...in earliest memory of course. :shrug:
 
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