Alright, anime. Animation produced in Japan, essentially, is the best way to define it. It’s popular worldwide, though, and not just in Japan by any means. This is particularly true over the last few decades, with , , and some of the earliest movies proving especially eye-opening to audiences outside Japan, with all of those demonstrating how great anime could be.

To look at slightly more recent anime films, though, here are the best ones released in the last 30 years. This puts them all as movies that came out after anime’s arguable global rise, so . It’ll hopefully go without saying, but these films can also be counted as some of the best animated movies (more generally speaking) of the last three decades, too.

Yep, Hayao Miyazaki was a name worth mentioning in the introduction, and he’s someone who’s inevitably going to show up a fair few times when talking about the best anime movies of the past several decades. He’s not the be-all and end-all anime director, but he’s a household name for good reason, with one of his strongest efforts as a filmmaker being .

There’s a fantastical premise here, as is the case with many (but not all) Miyazaki films, with a story that begins with a young woman trying to undo a curse, and gradually grows into something grander in scale. Howl’s Moving Castle works solidly on a narrative front, but ; that’s the stuff that truly makes it a modern classic.

Since it starts bizarre and just gets weirder with every passing scene, may well qualify as an example of an animated arthouse movie. It’s about a man romantically pursuing a woman, getting mixed up with a bunch of criminals, and then ending up on the run. While on the run, he gets trapped inside a giant whale, and that’s where he – plus some other characters – remain for a good chunk of Mind Game.

This one’s great because it tells . Mind Game is perplexing, but the wildness of it all is central to the experience. It’s funny, philosophical, sometimes moving, and about as far from predictable as a film can possibly be.

deals with themes of identity, revenge, fame, and death, all the while proving psychologically intense and undoubtedly disturbing. It’s one of the more mature animated movies released in the last few decades, or maybe even ever. There are shocking sights within it, but and effectively devastating.

The premise of Perfect Blue involves a singer turned actress slowly unraveling because of various intensifying stresses in her life, including a dangerous fan/stalker. Because it gets so deeply into her head, though, Perfect Blue ends up far more complex than any plot summary might suggest, and even despite the experience of watching this being sometimes unpleasant, it is nonetheless an essential anime film, and understandably the most well-known one Satoshi Kon ever directed.

Hayao Miyazaki’s most recent film, , could end up being his final one, even though it’s been historically hard to know when Miyazaki plans to retire. It was released a decade on from , and Miyazaki himself was in his early 80s when it came out, so the idea of it being a swansong isn’t an absurd one, for as hard as that might be to admit.

But on a positive note, The Boy and the Heron would be one hell of a final filmmaking statement from the legendary director, . In any event, it’s a great movie and one of the decade’s best so far, animated or otherwise.

directed the aforementioned Mind Game, and made something even better just over a decade later with . This one is also pretty surreal and tells an unconventional love story (of sorts), but it’s a bit more digestible and perhaps funnier, too, playing out like an (often) intoxicated odyssey set mostly at night, revolving around university students dealing with love and finding a purpose in life.

That sounds a bit vague, sure, but Night Is Short, Walk On Girl works because it takes these broad ideas and themes and explores them in stylistically and visually unique ways. The , but anyone who has an appreciation for Japanese animation ought to make checking this film out a priority, if they haven’t already.

As a series, was undoubtedly one of the most iconic of the 1990s, working as a subversive, bleak, and oftentimes challenging show that ran for a single season before concluding on a – let’s say – somewhat controversial note. A little after the show ended, it got a theatrically released feature-length finale called , and… yeah, this one was controversial too, but for slightly different reasons.

It's a grander finale than the show initially had, but that spectacle is warped into something particularly nightmarish and apocalyptic in nature. It is a deeply nihilistic film in just about every way, with . The End of Evangelion is a hopeless and soul-crushing movie, but also an excellent one, for what it’s worth.

is a sci-fi/action movie about a race that happens in outer space that involves cars going very, very, very (very) fast. And that’s all you need. Call it style over substance if you want, but Redline doesn’t care. It knows what it wants to deliver, and it .

The animation here really is something to behold, and, perhaps a little like Mind Game, Redline is an example of a movie that uses animation to depict something that would be near-impossible to replicate in live-action. Actually, that being said, 2008’s is probably the most comparable film, but that one is also borderline-animated at times (and sorry, Speed Racer fans, but Redline is better).

If people weren’t paying attention to Hayao Miyazaki before, then might well have been the film to establish him as not just a great animation director, but a great filmmaker full-stop. It’s one of the most important international films of its time, and is probably only eclipsed by another Miyazaki release just a few years later (more on that legendary one in a bit).

The story here is similar to Howl’s Moving Castle, with the protagonist wanting to undo a curse and finding themselves wrapped up in a larger conflict while on their journey, but Princess Mononoke came first, and it tells that central premise is a more dramatic and emotionally resonant way. It’s probably the most epic feeling of any Hayao Miyazaki movie, and is .

Plenty of people will point to Perfect Blue as being Satoshi Kon’s magnum opus, but there’s an argument to be made that is even better. It’s actually his magnum opus-iest. Also, the sci-fi plot’s kind of impossible to describe. There’s a device that lets therapists see the dreams of their patients, but said device gets stolen early on, and then there’s a mad rush to try and get it back before, like, everything collapses? Or disappears? Or implodes in on itself?

Are the stakes personal or world-ending? Or both? Or does it just not matter? Reality and the worlds conjured up by the mind while dreaming collide in spectacular fashion throughout Paprika. . It’s one of the most jam-packed 90-minute movies ever made, and even if you might never work out what’s going on 100%, rewatches do prove inevitably rewarding.

will often get singled out as one of the best movies ever made, so calling it both Hayao Miyazaki’s best film and the greatest anime movie of the last 30 years isn’t too bold a claim to make. It has a story that sees a young girl and her parents get trapped in some sort of strange, fantastical realm, with the girl having to save both them and herself after they get transformed into pigs.

It’s one of the most striking fantasy films ever made visually speaking, and Spirited Away also works tremendously well as a coming-of-age movie. It’s got everything you could want out of an animated movie, and is able to be appreciated by pretty much anyone, regardless of age. .

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