Animated films go back over a century and were popularized by Walt Disney. His breakthrough came with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937 and continued with “Fantasia” and “Pinocchio” two years later. Disney retains a premier producer of animated movies, largely because of its ownership of Pixar, which produced the Toy Story films and “Soul.” Disney is not alone in producing animated films. Virtually every major studio has some successes from the genre in its library.
Animated films are also vehicles for famous actors via voiceovers. Among the most well-known is Tom Hanks as Woody in the Toy Story movies.
24/7 Tempo has picked the worst animated movie, using an index composed of several measures from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), an online movie database owned by Amazon, and Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator. Across the board, the two common (and contradictory) critiques of animated films are that they will only appeal to young children or that they have too much adult humor. Apparently, there is a golden ratio of age-appropriate versus mature comedy-in-disguise that these feature films must achieve in order to have broad appeal.
To identify the worst animated movie ever made, 24/7 Tempo reviewed the 767 animated films with at least 10,000 reviews on IMDb. Only those with a runtime of greater than one hour that had a wide release in the United States were considered. To rank these movies, we created an index composed of each film’s IMDb rating, as well as its Audience Score and Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes. Data was collected in mid-March of 2021. Data on domestic box office came from The Numbers, an online movie database owned by consulting firm Nash Information Services. Cast information comes from IMDb.
Notably, many of the worst animated movies are live-action/animation combinations, in which actors were filmed “interacting” with nonexistent characters who were only added to the film later — a challenge for any performer. That said, the presence in many of these movies of top-flight talent, whether in live-action form or merely as voices, is, unfortunately, no guarantee that it will be any good.
The worst animated movie is “The Emoji Movie.” Released in 2017, the film stars T.J. Miller, James Corden, Anna Faris and Maya Rudolph. Its domestic box office totaled $87.9 million.
This film that never should have been features floating emotive faces that live in a soulless cyber-city inside a cell phone. Even the concept deserved no more than a guffaw and a one-way ticket to the wastebasket. The talented voice cast could not save this film from itself.
Click here to read about all the worst animated movies of all time.