Top Ten Anime Movies of All Time

Anime encompasses every genre known to filmmakers and writers, so it's not easy to choose the best of the bunch. There are a few movies, however, that stand out to fans both new and old.

The most notable anime film in the minds of many is Akira, released in Japan in 1988. An immediate blockbuster due to its groundbreaking animation style, Akira introduced many of today's hardcore anime fans to the artform that Japanese animation could be and helped make anime the best-selling craze that it is today. Its fluid and realistic animation pioneered the look that has contributed to anime's popularity. Up to that point, the cartoons had generally relied on animation with a limited amount of motion in order to keep production costs down. But Akira proved that if a better anime were build, the fans would come.

Ghost in the Shell relies heavily on its own philosophy to propel both the main storyline and the development of its characters. This philosophy asks a question that has been posed by many live-action movies, although rarely as articulately. It asks, "What does it mean to be human?" Taking place in a world where the human mind can be downloaded and copied, Ghost in the Shell plays out like a university-level discussion on the essence of the human spirit. In the end, no real answers are attained, but the questions are well worth the time that it took to watch the movie.

Perhaps one of the most underrated anime movies is R.O.D. (Read or Die). It didn't break any boundaries or ask any important questions, but R.O.D. is a prime example of one of the most important elements of an anime film: It's entertaining. It also does something else that anime often does better than any other type of film, and that is that it plays with the history of the world. In R.O.D., Britain became the most powerful world leader in the 20^th century and beyond. The characters are both memorable, particularly the clones of various historical figures, and sympathetic. R.O.D. proves that a film doesn't have to be groundbreaking in order to be great.