Take a look and massage your nostalgia receptors – and maybe find something mindblowing you’ve never seen before.

Our list incorporates everything from Disney to Studio Ghibli, stop-motion nightmares to psychedelic headtrips, illustrated documentaries to however-the-hell you classify the work of maverick Jan Švankmajer. In composing this list, we polled Time Out writers and experts including Fantastic Mr Fox ’s Wes Anderson and Wallace and Gromit’s Nick Park, and the results show just how expansive the genre can be. On the contrary, the best animated movies work on multiple levels, for broad audiences. Of course, that doesn’t mean that animation is only a realm for children. Whether it’s a classic of Disney’s Golden Age, a more recent Pixar heart-tugger for the young’uns or something weirder that your parents thought was age-appropriate when they picked it off a video store shelf, most first cinematic loves are animated.

And we’re going to bet that, in most cases, it starts with a cartoon. No matter how snooty and highfalutin their taste in movies gets, every cineaste has to start somewhere.

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