Tier List
Disney Movies Tier List: The Best Animated Films Ranked (2026)
The best Walt Disney Animation classics, from Snow White and The Lion King to Frozen, Moana, and Encanto, ranked from S-tier to D-tier. Then build your own Disney tier list with head-to-head comparisons.
The Complete Disney Movie Tier List
Most Disney rankings are nostalgia rankings. They put the film you watched at seven years old on top and work backwards from there. This one tries not to. Nineteen Walt Disney Animation features, from Snow White in 1937 to Encanto in 2021, sorted S through D against four tests we are willing to state out loud and be held to. (Looking for Toy Story and Inside Out? Those are Pixar, see our separate Pixar tier list.)
The four tests
- Does it still play cold? Watched today, by an adult, with the nostalgia switched off. This is the test that does the most work.
- Did it move animation forward, or did it execute the formula well?
- The songs. Disney is a musical studio. A great Disney film with a forgettable score is close to a contradiction.
- The villain. Disney villains carry the stakes. A weak one flattens everything around it.
One thing that is deliberately not a test: historical importance. It is why Snow White sits in A and not S, and if that reads as heresy, the argument is below. A ranking that cannot cost anything is not a ranking. Think Mulan belongs in S? Settle it yourself in minutes with Shortlist.
The Lion King
(1994)The only film here that clears all four tests without an asterisk. It plays cold, it is the studio's high-water mark for scale, the songs are the ones everyone still knows, and Scar is the best villain Disney has written. The obvious pick, and the right one.
Beauty and the Beast
(1991)The first animated film nominated for Best Picture, and the only Disney musical whose songs carry plot instead of pausing it. Every number moves the story: cut one and the film breaks. That is rarer than it sounds.
Aladdin
(1992)Robin Williams improvised his way to a new kind of animated performance, and the animators drew to keep up. It is the fastest film Disney has ever made, and the only one whose comedy still lands at full speed.
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The Little Mermaid
(1989)The film that restarted the studio, and you can hear the desperation in it: Ashman and Menken write like the company is dying, because it was. "Part of Your World" is the blueprint every Disney "I want" song has copied since.
Mulan
(1998)The best action filmmaking in the canon, and the only Renaissance film whose hero wins by being clever rather than chosen. Held out of S by a comic dragon the film does not need.
Frozen
(2013)The biggest thing Disney has released this century and still not one of its three best. It is front-loaded: "Let It Go" lands near the midpoint and nothing after it comes close. See the argument below.
Encanto
(2021)The most sophisticated script Disney has produced in twenty years: a film about generational trauma with no villain at all, which should not work and does. The songs are the best of the modern era.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1937)The most important film on this list by a distance, and not the fifth best. There was no feature animation before it. But watched cold today it is a forty-minute story stretched to eighty-three, and we said we would not rank on importance alone.
Moana
(2016)The best-looking film Disney has made, and the ocean is a genuinely new idea for a character. The story underneath it is the standard chosen-one arc, executed cleanly and without surprise.
Tangled
(2010)The film that proved the CG princess could work, carried by Mother Gothel, who is scary in a way Disney villains usually are not: she never raises her voice.
Zootopia
(2016)A real detective plot, which no other Disney film has attempted, wrapped around a prejudice allegory that gets muddled the harder it pushes. Sharp, funny, slightly confused about its own thesis.
The Jungle Book
(1967)The last film Walt personally oversaw, and it is barely a story: a series of encounters strung on a walk. It survives on two of the best songs in the canon and on Baloo, who is pure charm.
Lilo & Stitch
(2002)The only Disney film about poverty, and it is honest about it: a broke sister trying not to lose custody. The alien plot is the excuse. The watercolor backgrounds are the studio's last great hand-painted work.
Hercules
(1997)The most stylish film Disney has made, and the most tonally confused. The gospel chorus is a genuinely great idea. The film around it cannot decide whether it is a myth or a parody of one.
The Princess and the Frog
(2009)A gorgeous return to hand-drawn animation with the studio's hardest-working heroine, and it keeps her a frog for most of its runtime. A structural mistake it never recovers from.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1996)The harshest call on this list, and the one we are least sure of. "Hellfire" is the most adult thing the studio has ever animated. Then there are the comic gargoyles. Not ranked low for being dark, ranked low for flinching.
Pocahontas
(1995)Top-tier craft attached to a story that gets its own history badly wrong. "Colors of the Wind" is a great song doing damage control for the film around it. We ranked the film, not the intention.
Chicken Little
(2005)Disney chasing DreamWorks: pop-culture gags, a snarky hero, and none of the studio's own instincts. Made at the creative low point that got Lasseter hired to fix it.
Home on the Range
(2004)The film that ended the hand-drawn era, and the studio treated it as a write-off before it opened. Nothing in it is offensive. Nothing in it is memorable either.
The Calls People Will Argue With
A tier list that nobody disagrees with is a list of facts, not a ranking. Here are the five placements we expect to defend, and the reasoning behind each one.
Frozen in A, not S
Frozen is the biggest thing Disney has released this century, and it is still not one of the studio's three best films. The problem is shape. "Let It Go" arrives near the midpoint and the film never tops it, so the whole back half is spent coming down from a peak it hit early. Then it trades the sister story it has been carefully building for a twist villain in Hans that it has not earned a single frame of. S-tier films get stronger as they go. Frozen peaks and coasts.
Snow White in A, not S
On test two, Snow White wins more decisively than anything else here. There was no feature animation before it. It invented the form and bet a studio on it. But test one is the one that decides the tier, and watched cold today it is a forty-minute story stretched across eighty-three minutes, with a heroine who does very little and dwarves who do most of the film. Importance and rewatchability are different things, and we said importance would not carry a film on its own. This is where that costs us.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame in C
The harshest placement on the list, and the one we would most readily be talked out of. Half of this film is the most ambitious work Walt Disney Animation has ever put on screen: Frollo is a genuinely frightening study of a man who believes his cruelty is righteousness, and "Hellfire" should not exist in a film rated G. The other half has three comic gargoyles doing vaudeville. It is not ranked low for being dark. It is ranked low for losing its nerve about being dark.
Pocahontas in C
The animation is among the studio's most beautiful and "Colors of the Wind" is a legitimately great song. Both are attached to a film that turns a colonial invasion into a romance and gets its own history badly wrong in the process. Craft does not launder a story. We ranked the film, not the intention behind it.
The Lion King at number one, which is the boring answer
We know. It is the pick everyone makes, and picking it feels like a failure of nerve. We are making it anyway, because it is the only film on this list that clears all four tests without an asterisk: it plays cold, it is the studio's high-water mark for scale and animation, its songs are the ones people still know by heart thirty years on, and Scar is the best villain the studio has written. The consensus is occasionally correct. This is one of those times.
What This List Covers, and What It Leaves Out
Nineteen films, not sixty-two. This is Walt Disney Animation Studios only, and only the ones worth arguing about.
- No Pixar. Toy Story, Up and Inside Out are a different studio with a different house style, and putting them here would flatter Disney with someone else's work. They get their own Pixar tier list.
- No live-action remakes. The 2019 Lion King is not an animated film in any sense that matters to this ranking.
- No package films. The 1940s anthologies (Fun and Fancy Free, Melody Time) are compilations, not features, and nobody has ever wanted to rank them.
- Nothing nobody disputes. The canon has sixty-two features, and most of them generate no argument at all. A list of nineteen you have opinions about is more useful than a list of sixty-two you do not.
How to Build Your Own Disney Tier List
You just built one. Notice how fast it went: Disney rankings are tangled up with childhood, so scoring these films feels impossible, but picking between two of them takes no thought at all. That is the whole trick.
Five films will not tell you whether Encanto cracks your top five, whether Frozen is overrated, or where the whole 2000s stretch belongs. A full ranking will, and that is what Shortlist is for: every Disney film you have seen, the same taps, a share link when you are done.
Read more about the comparison-based approach in our movie tier list guide.
Two different things get scored around this page. The S to D tiers above are editorial, and S means a film that held up rather than one that reviewed well on opening weekend. The score you see in the app is a different number: it is built from the head-to-head comparisons you make, scaled to 0 to 10, not from critic averages. How Shortlist scores work sets out the whole method.
Disney Tier List FAQ
What is the best Disney movie of all time?
The Lion King (1994). It is the only film in the canon that clears every test we rank on: it still plays for an adult with no nostalgia attached, it is the studio's peak for scale and animation, its songs are the ones people still know thirty years later, and Scar is the best villain Disney has written. Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992) are the other two S-tier picks, and all three come from the Disney Renaissance.
Is Frozen overrated?
Slightly, yes, and it is still a very good film. We put it in A rather than S because it is front-loaded: "Let It Go" peaks around the midpoint and nothing that follows matches it, and the ending swaps the sister story for a twist villain the film has not set up. Being the most popular Disney film of the modern era is not the same as being one of the best three ever made.
Why is Snow White not number one?
Because we rank on how a film plays today, not on how important it was. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) is the most historically significant film on the list by a wide margin: it invented the animated feature. Watched cold in 2026 it is also a slight, slow film whose heroine does very little. It sits in A-tier, which is a judgment on the movie, not on its place in history.
What was the first Disney animated movie?
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) was Disney's, and the world's, first full-length animated feature film. It was a massive gamble that paid off and built the studio.
Are Pixar movies Disney movies?
Pixar is owned by Disney, but it's a separate studio with its own films like Toy Story, Up, and Inside Out. This list covers Walt Disney Animation Studios features only. For Pixar, see our dedicated Pixar movies ranked tier list.
What is the Disney Renaissance?
The Disney Renaissance refers to the era from 1989 to 1999 when Disney released a run of acclaimed hits: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Mulan, and more: that revived the studio commercially and creatively. Most fans' S-tier picks come from this period.
Related Tier Lists
The Reel
One sharp movie newsletter, every Tuesday
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Rank Disney your way
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