Paste's The 100 Best Anime Movies of All Time

A secret military project endangers Neo-Tokyo when it turns a biker gang member into a rampaging psychic psychopath that only two teenagers and a group of psychics can stop.

Spirited Away is an Oscar winning Japanese animated film about a ten year old girl who wonders away from her parents along a path that leads to a world ruled by strange and unusual monster-like animals. Her parents have been changed into pigs along with others inside a bathhouse full of these creatures. Will she ever see the world how it once was?

In the wake of his mother's death and his father's remarriage, a headstrong boy ventures into a dreamlike world shared by the living and the dead in search of his missing stepmother.

In the final months of World War II, 14-year-old Seita and his sister Setsuko are orphaned when their mother is killed during an air raid in Kobe, Japan. After a falling out with their aunt, they move into an abandoned bomb shelter. With no surviving relatives and their emergency rations depleted, Seita and Setsuko struggle to survive.

In the year 2029, the barriers of our world have been broken down by the net and by cybernetics, but this brings new vulnerability to humans in the form of brain-hacking. When a highly-wanted hacker known as 'The Puppetmaster' begins involving them in politics, Section 9, a group of cybernetically enhanced cops, are called in to investigate and ...

When a machine that allows therapists to enter their patient's dreams is stolen, all hell breaks loose. Only a young female therapist can stop it: Paprika.

A lifelong love of flight inspires Japanese aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi, whose storied career includes the creation of the A-6M World War II fighter plane.

Rising pop star Mima Kirigoe quits singing to pursue a career as an actress. After she takes up a role on a popular detective show, her handlers and collaborators begin turning up murdered. Harboring feelings of guilt and haunted by visions of her former self, Mima's reality and fantasy meld into a frenzied paranoia.

A Japanese police unit who use giant anthropomorphic robots (called Labors) is caught up in a political struggle between the civilian authorities and the military when a terrorist act is blamed on an Air Force jet. With the aid of a government agent, the team gets close to a terrorist leader to stop things from going out of control when after th...

Two sisters move to the country with their father in order to be closer to their hospitalized mother, and discover the surrounding trees are inhabited by Totoros, magical spirits of the forest. When the youngest runs away from home, the older sister seeks help from the spirits to find her.

In the future, a race car driver uses his psychokinetic abilities against his opponents.

On a future Earth, war between the Kingdom of Honneamise and its rival, The Republic, is inevitable. As evolving technology creates new ways to wage war, a small group seeks to propel mankind into space in their world’s first spaceflight program. For astronaut candidate Shirotsugh Lhadatt, it’s a personal odyssey as he grows from an aimless youn...

Ashitaka, a prince of the disappearing Ainu tribe, is cursed by a demonized boar god and must journey to the west to find a cure. Along the way, he encounters San, a young human woman fighting to protect the forest and Lady Eboshi, who is trying to destroy it. Ashitaka must find a way to bring balance to this conflict.

As the human city development encroaches on the raccoon population's forest and meadow habitat, the raccoons find themselves faced with the very real possibility of extinction. In response, the raccoons engage in a desperate struggle to stop the construction and preserve their home.

A powerful statement against war, Barefoot Gen is a disturbing story about the effect of the atomic bomb on a boy's life and the lives of the Japanese people.

In the midst of societal conflict in the futuristic city of Metropolis, Kenichi and his uncle Shunsaku Ban set out to uncover the mystery behind the first human-like robot, Tima.

Earth braces for an invasion of the Zentradi.

A movie studio is being torn down. TV interviewer Genya Tachibana has tracked down its most famous star, Chiyoko Fujiwara, who has been a recluse since she left acting some 30 years ago. Tachibana delivers a key to her, and it causes her to reflect on her career; as she's telling the story, Tachibana and his long-suffering cameraman are drawn in.

After being raped by an evil feudal lord and subsequently getting banished from her village, a peasant girl makes a pact with the Devil to gain magical powers and take her revenge.

A story about the most popular racing event in the galaxy, the Redline, and the various racers who compete in it.

After a deadly encounter with two yakuza, a loser with a crush on his childhood girlfriend goes to heaven and back, embarking on a psychedelic self-discovery experience with her and his friends.

As a young boy, Xu-Xian is forced to free his pet, a small snake. Unbeknownst to him, the snake is actually a young snake goddess named Bai-Niang and she is in love with him. Many years later, when they are both adults, the princess is magically transformed into a human and sets out to find her love. But the local wizard believes her to be a vam...

Jubei is a wandering noble sword for hire, but when a chance meeting leads him to save a young ninja woman from rape, he makes enemies with a group of demonic humans. Jubei and the woman part ways but later a government spy forces Jubei to join up with her again and investigate the mysterious death of an entire village.

A collection of three short Anime stories by the Japanese Anime-Masters Koji Morimato, Tensai Okamuro and Otomo Katsuhiro.

After a global war, the seaside kingdom known as the Valley of the Wind remains one of the last strongholds on Earth untouched by a poisonous jungle and the powerful insects that guard it. Led by the courageous Princess Nausicaä, the people of the Valley engage in an epic struggle to restore the bond between humanity and Earth.

A 27-year-old office worker travels to the countryside while reminiscing about her childhood, when she returns to the family farm she meets a young farmer who's the cousin of her brother-in-law. She is immediately taken with his hard-working, salt-of-the-earth ways.

When mysterious foreign entrepreneurs appear with the intention of tearing down Treasure Town and replacing it with an amusement park, Black and White face their greatest adversaries yet. It is up to the destructive Black to save the fate of the city and up to the gentle White to save Black from his own dark nature. (Source ANN)

Mr. Takazawa, an elderly invalid who is cared for at his home by Haruko, a young nursing student, is chosen by the Japanese Ministry of Public Welfare to test the Z-001, a computerized hospital bed with robotic features that allegedly displays more efficiency and skills than any human nurse, but Haruko mistrusts a machine unable to consider huma...

The night before the school festival, things seem to be repeating themselves. Gradually, all the world functions come to a stop, the only ones that are not affected are a select group of student friends.

High schoolers Mitsuha and Taki are complete strangers living separate lives. But one night, they suddenly switch places. Mitsuha wakes up in Taki’s body, and he in hers. This bizarre occurrence continues to happen randomly, and the two must adjust their lives around each other.

Christmas in Tokyo, Japan. Three homeless friends: a young girl, a transvestite, and a middle-aged bum. While foraging through some trash, they find an abandoned newborn.

A young witch, on her mandatory year of independent life, finds fitting into a new community difficult while she supports herself by running an air courier service.

Unhappy after his new baby sister displaces him, four-year-old Kun begins meeting people and pets from his family's history in their unique house in order to help him become the big brother he was meant to be.

Amuro Ray and Char Aznable settle their rivalry once and for all during the Second Neo Zeon War.

An anthology of various tales told in various styles with robots being the one common element among them.

A Papa Panda and his son escape from the zoo in search of a home and find one with a little orphan girl. The pandas decide to stay with her and become her new family. They, then, find a lost circus tiger and help him find his way back.

In a utopian society created at the end of the third world war, a female warrior who has been plucked from the badlands begins to see cracks in this new facade. And what does this community have planned for the rest of humankind?

A young boy and a girl with a magic crystal must race against pirates and foreign agents in a search for a legendary floating castle.

In a far-future time ruled by the supernatural, a young girl requests the help of a vampire hunter to kill the vampire who has bitten her and thus prevent her from becoming a vampire herself.

Four talented alien musicians are kidnapped by a record producer who disguises them as humans. Shep, a space pilot in love with bass player Stella, follows them to Earth. Reprogrammed to forget their real identities and renamed The Crescendolls, the group quickly becomes a huge success playing soulless corporate pop. At a concert, Shep manages t...

Ishida Shouya bullies a deaf girl, Nishimiya Shouko, to the point that she transfers to another school. As a result, he is ostracized and bullied himself with no friends to speak of and no plans for the future. This is the story of his path to redemption.

In an alternate postwar timeline, Japan is devided into the Union-controlled North and the US-controlled South.

A young high-school girl, Makoto Konno, discovers that she has the ability to "leap" through time to the past after she avoids a fatal train accident. "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" is a sequel to the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui of the same name.

In Italy in the 1930s, sky pirates in biplanes terrorize wealthy cruise ships as they sail the Adriatic Sea. The only pilot brave enough to stop the scourge is the mysterious Porco Rosso, a former World War I flying ace who was somehow turned into a pig during the war. As he prepares to battle the pirate crew's American ace, Porco Rosso enlists ...

In 1860s Britain, a boy inventor finds himself caught in the middle of a deadly conflict over a revolutionary advance in steam power.

The adventures of a brave young boy who travels from planet to planet in a determined quest to avenge his mother's death.

NERV faces a brutal attack from SEELE, but with Asuka in a coma, and Shinji in a nervous breakdown, things soon turn into the surreal. This movie provides an concurrent ending to the final two episodes of the show "Neon Genesis Evangelion"

Jin Roh is a Japanese anime political thriller from 1999 based on a Manga from Mamoru Oshii. The film is set in the 1950’s depicting a Japanese dystopia city in a fight against terrorists.

Voices of a Distant Star chronicles a long-distance relationship between two close friends who communicate by sending emails via their mobile phones across interstellar space.

Groundbreaking director Mamoru Oshii continues to push the boundaries of art and anime with this universally acclaimed cyber thriller following cyborg detective Batou as he tries to unravel the reasons for a murderous robot revolt in the year 2032. A quest for a killer that becomes a mind bending search for the meaning of life.