Incredibly, in the more than a century since Winsor McCay and French Fantasmagorie first created moving pictures on screen as a popular form of entertainment, animation has provided us with everything from steamboat steered rats and cunning stop-motion foxes to, well, your name: A group of singing dwarves, psychic Japanese teenagers, counterculture hipster cats, crooning French triplets, classically poisonous Sarts and demons, human-saving robots, superhero families, the emotional realms of young women's brains and a cute, unclassifiable creature called Totoro. Was once thought to distract children's film has developed into a kind of creative and emotional resonance of the media, just like any as a live-action movie for 18 years of age and older (or, for like Anomalisa stuntman, this is an incredibly alternative to actual adults as the leading role of the "adult" film).

So we're counting down our selection of the 3 greatest animated films of all time -- features (and a few key shorts that are too good to include) that push the boundaries of what line drawing, computerized pixels or puppetry can do for moviegoers. These are the things that scare us, move us, break us down and remind us how fun and moving it can be to watch cartoons in a crowd, etc.

Rango (2011)

After Johnny Depp and director Gore Verbinski completed their collaboration on the Pirates of the Caribbean film, they reunited for this whimsical animated western about a pet lizard stranded in a desert town and becoming its reluctant savior. Rango references everything from Clint Eastwood's "No Man" images to Depp's own Las Vegas anecdotes of fear and loathing, but it's the surreal visual stunts and deadpan tone that make the film a must-see -- like a cartoon version of a Coen Brothers comedy.

'Carolan' (2009)

The pre-Christmas nightmare has its unsettling moments -- but Neil Gaiman's Henry Selick adaptation is creepy. Frustrated by parental neglect, the film's protagonist enters a world where everyone she knows has been replaced by a happier but hollow replica, their living eyes replaced by hard black buttons. In another medium, this would be straight-up horror (think body Snatcher's tsartorial invasion), but Selick's stop-motion animation and his clever use of 3D give us enough distance that we don't have to go through our fingers, but still make us afraid to look away.

"Charlotte's Web" (1973)

EB White's beloved children's novel about Wilbur the Pig and his friend Charlotte the spider has been adapted into a musical by the Sherman Brothers (Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book) with refreshing songs: People will never really forget templeton the mouse dancing in the amusement park, eating garbage and singing "The fair is a veritable hodgepodge -orgasborg-orgasborg!" White reportedly hated the film himself, but it retains much of the tenderness and melancholy of his book, a charming little story from an unlikely place.