When asked if there were any films that excited him in 2010, John Landis named Fantastic Mr. It’s a far cry from the popular image of animation as easy entertainment, but it’s rare to see a filmmaker explore personal and political demons outside of fiction with this level of surreal artistry. Director Ari Folman used his own struggles with memories of his military service during the Lebanon War as the subject matter, and he wanted to “bring out the horrors of war through nightmares and hallucinations.” From the opening dream sequence with 26 dogs to a haunting collection of live footage from the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the imagery of Waltz with Bashir is certainly horrific. The making of the film involved interviews and recorded “talking heads” in the traditional documentary manner, but these were only the starting point for four years of work on digital cutout animation. It would more accurately be described as a docudrama, or the filmic equivalent of a nonfiction novel. When Waltz with Bashir was first released, it was advertised as the first fully animated feature-length documentary. And who can resist Scrat? Ice Age may have some of the dumbest sequels in recent animated history, but the original hasn’t lost its charm. The emotional side of the story, particularly the past heartbreak of Ray Romano’s Manny and how caring for a human child bonds him with the other two leads, is surprisingly strong, and a much more earnest effort than other early CG films. It followed Shrek’s lead in casting celebrity voices and adopting a sometimes sneering wit, but it’s not nearly as bitter a movie.
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The heavy emphasis on action-comedy gives the film a nice kinetic energy. The characters are just stylized enough to let them move and emote appealingly. Ice Age holds up fairly well in that regard. It doesn’t help that the technology was still maturing in the 2000s the strain against technical limits is evident in many of the visuals from the decade. This article could almost be called “Best Animated Films of the 2000s that aren’t CGI.” I have a hostility toward the form that time, and CG’s continued stranglehold over the American cartoon feature market. Tangled and Frozen get more attention, but for me, Frog is the strongest of Disney’s princess stories from the 21st century. It did well with critics and moviegoers too – unfortunately, not well enough to make Disney’s promise to revive 2D animation stick, or to keep future fairy tale films from being saddled with obnoxious generic titles on the spurious logic that they’d otherwise be taken as “ fairy tale for girls” (because lord knows those never make money). The Jazz Age New Orleans setting only does so much to shake up a thoroughly traditional tale, but there’s nothing wrong with a little old-fashioned romance and magic. Controversy dogged initial development, but the finished film is a beautiful last bow for the style of Disney film begun by Musker and Clements’ The Little Mermaid twenty years before. Its immediate predecessors had done better at the box office, Disney legends John Musker and Ron Clements were back in the director’s chair, and Frog represented a return to 2D animation after the Michael Eisner regime had vowed to retire the form. But there was a sense by the time The Princess and the Frog premiered that the ship was starting to right.
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Whether they were traditional or digital, most (not all) of the Disney cartoons of the 2000s couldn’t muster more than a lukewarm reception, and sometimes bombed out on a massive scale. Here are ten of the best animated films of the 2000s not produced by Pixar: And so impactful were their films that work from other studios, even the majors, can end up overlooked in public recollections of the decade. Such was Pixar’s success that they displaced Disney as the big game in town for animation.
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The films they released in those years remain among the most beloved animated pictures ever made and cemented the studio’s stellar reputation with audiences and critics. Shrek’s DreamWorks Animation may have come into its own during the 2000s, but the decade belonged to Pixar. And there was a near-total displacement of any form of animation other than CGI by the decade’s end – another trend that has yet to subside. But the success of Shrek and related titles encouraged a cynical, self-aware, and celebrity-led sense of humor that’s become persistent in American animation.
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While the notion that animation is “just” for kids persists to this day, films like Shrek helped to weaken that stigma. There was a proliferation of companies owned or partnered with major studios, offering more feature-length cartoon content than mainstream cinema had ever seen. There’s a bittersweet quality to the history of animation once you reach the 2000s.