There Are 27 Near-Perfect Fantasy Movies According To Metacritic

Originally perceived as a quirky pet project from the guy responsible for 1973's "American Graffiti," "Star Wars" — later renamed "Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope" — permanently shifted the landscape of popular culture upon its release in 1977. It annihilated box office records; launched a merchandising empire (pun definitely intended); and turned magical characters like Darth Vader and Chewbacca into household names. 

But setting all that aside, "A New Hope" plays out as a simple enough story. In fact, practically any teenager who feels stifled by bland, homogeneous suburbia should be able to relate to Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). Luke starts this movie — effectively the beginning of the entire Star Wars franchise — as an ambitious young dude stuck on his boring, sandy home planet with a job at his uncle's moisture farm. Luke grows up to be god-master of all space wizards; but as far as "A New Hope" is concerned, he's just an average Jedi trainee with a couple of robot pals and an unfortunate attraction to his sister.

If 1999 was, as some suggest, the greatest single year Hollywood has ever had, and "Being John Malkovich" is 1999's best film, as others have opined, well, hey, maybe this movie is worth a gander if you haven't already had the pleasure. 

Director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman ground surreal and psychological elements with sadly mundane themes of envy and ingratitude; so even folks who find themselves alienated by art house abstraction may find themselves quite entirely mesmerized and delighted. 

John Cusack plays Craig Schwartz — a failed puppeteer, talented file clerk, and more explicitly bitter version of the mediocre schlub archetype that winds up the protagonist of too many movies; Cameron Diaz plays Lotte Schwartz — human companion to several animals and Craig's woefully underappreciated wife; Catherine Keener portrays Craig's acerbic, unrequited office crush; and in a truly astounding coincidence, John Malkovich plays noted screen and theater actor John Malkovich — you know, that guy from the jewel thief movie.       

Would you believe us if we told you one of the all-time great fantasy films also happens to be one of the all-time great comedy films? ... No? ... Why not? 

Are you calling us liars? 

Seriously though, 1975's "Monty Python And The Holy Grail" is as highly-quotable as any low-budget production guided by sketch performers with no previous feature-length directorial experience has any business being. As a parody whose success surpasses all the earnest King Arthur films that came before or after, "The Holy Grail" inflicted permanent damage to King Arthur's brand name in Hollywood. Thanks to Terry Gilliam and his cohorts, new retellings of the Arthurian legend don't feel like King Arthur movies; they're just overly-serious versions of Monty Python. 

But we'll take the Knights Who Say Ni and Flesh Eating Bunnies over some dusty old business about a sword in a lake any day.  

Nobody knows what happens after we die, and that big black unknowable provides the groundwork for all kinds of creative works. It's such a common artistic jump-off point that multiple other films either share the title or incorporate the phrase "After Life" somewhere in their name. Forget those other movies though, we're talking about the 1998 Hirokazu Koreeda-directed rumination on memory — and possibly the concept of heaven and hell, if Roger Ebert's interpretation hits the mark. 

According to the film's metaphysics, once you die, you can pick one memory to relive for eternity. For most people, that's a complicated choice requiring days of serious consideration. For you, obviously, the answer would be "reading 'Looper,'" so consider yourself lucky. Also noteworthy: despite its supernatural topic, "After Life" includes the fewest special effects of any other film on this list. So, it seems after life resembles regular life more closely than you might expect.

Miraculously, the Toy Story series manages something that Star Wars, The Matrix, Christopher Nolan's Batman saga, and a litany of other "more serious" film franchises failed to pull off — a third movie that was, at one point, generally considered a satisfying conclusion to the previous two films. Obviously, that all changed in 2019 when "Toy Story 4" offered yet another worthy finale to the overarching Toy Story adventure ... but let's not get too sidetracked.

In 2010's addition to the happenings of Buzz, Woody, Mr. Potato Head, and the whole crew, Andy heads off to his freshmen year of undergrad. A related mishap lands his erstwhile talking playthings at the mercy of psychotic toddlers and an evil pink teddy bear voiced by Ned Beatty. If you've heard the ending's a massive tearjerker, we can't confirm or deny that information. We are tough adults who never cry at movies.

Whether due to its timelessness, ease of adaptability, or other factors, "Beauty and the Beast" is a French fairy tale originally published in 1756 that appears on this list of near-perfect contemporary fantasy films twice. We're supposing most readers are already familiar with the Disney version from the early '90s, but Jean Cocteau's live action iteration from 1946 may have slipped under your radar. It's not as cute as an animated musical, but it might have equal or more value to those of us with a penchant for gothic overtones and anguished romance. 

If Roger Ebert is to be taken at face value, Cocteau coverts pretty much the entire story into a Freudian sexual metaphor. So while it's not an "adult film" in the sense that we typically understand the phrase, this "Beauty and the Beast" isn't really a kids' flick either. 

For all the beats it manages to hit, the 2008 animated gem "Sita Sings the Blues" plays out as a remarkably cohesive piece. Shadow puppets hash out what they remember of the legend of Ramayana between segments of that same legend playing out in a completely different animation style, accompanied by the retro-American pop of Annette Hanshaw. Meanwhile, in a tale running alongside the myth, a character based on writer-director and modern-day Californian Nina Paley takes an unexpected trip to India. So this film is part reinterpreted legend, part memoir, part Annette Hanshaw celebration? 

Eh, it's a tough movie to explain. Maybe you should just watch it right here for free and legally instead. Paley registered "Sita Sings the Blues" as a legally public domain work as of 2010, and if you've got two hours to kill, it's hard to imagine a better under-the-radar film to discover.

In what's also one of the greatest martial arts movies of all time, director Ang Lee spins a timeless tale about teen romance, a stolen sword, systemic misogyny, and legendary warriors who might be absolute badasses, but need to get in touch with their feelings if they hope to experience true happiness.   

The success of "Crouching Tiger" — the most successful Chinese language film in history, as far as American box office is concerned — inspired an influx of Chinese releases with similar elements including 2002's "Hero" and 2004's "The House of Flying Daggers." Additionally, and entirely by accident, Le Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), Jen the reluctant bride (Ziyi Zhang), and the malicious Jade Fox (Pei-Pei Cheng) all fight with a total ambivalence for the laws of physics, continuing a trend that began with "The Matrix" the year prior.    

With 2015's "Inside Out," Disney and Pixar asked the question: "What if each of your emotions were characters voiced by celebrity comedians? Would it make for a thoroughly charming, funny, unusually-clever viewing experience for anyone who happened to be watching from a third-person perspective?" The answer, as it turns out, is yes.

Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith voice the personifications of Joy and Sadness living in the brain of a 10-year-old girl. The two polarities must correct a disastrous imbalance in their charge's memory and personality containment sections when her family moves to a new city, and the adjustment goes a little rougher than anticipated. It's a little like "Anatomy Park" from "Rick & Morty," except not as literal or disgusting.  

Stay tuned until the credits to find out what happens inside the minds of dogs and cats. (Spoiler: It's probably what you expect, but it's nevertheless visually actualized to a profound degree of hilariousness.)   

Not totally unlike "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," Pixar's 1995's franchise-starter "Toy Story" permanently shifted the landscape of children's films — or perhaps, the entire landscape of blockbuster cinema — by legitimizing computer animation as capable of producing just as much wonder and charm as the traditional, hand-drawn stuff. It's also a deft squishing together of multiple genre troupes — buddy movie, road movie, fish-out-of-water — and the introduction of Tom Hanks as Woody the cowboy and Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear the cosmic adventurer.

Even if the fundamental concept about toys that come to life when people aren't looking is borrowed from 1986's "The Christmas Toy," that lesser-known endeavor from The Jim Henson Company can't match the spectacular quipping of "Toy Story" — the first major league gig for a then c-list Hollywood screenwriter named Joss Whedon (who wrote the script with seven other people). Not only would children's animation be very different today if "Toy Story" hadn't been a home run — "The Avengers" and "Justice League"  both might've had a different director.  

If this is to be a definitive list of unassailable fantasy cinematic sagas, Studio Ghibli is notably underrepresented. Most notable, perhaps, is the absence of 1997's brilliant "Princess Mononoke." But at least one of director Hayao Miyazaki's essential, staggering animations found its way into Metacritic's extra-good graces. 

At the onset of 2001's "Spirited Away," a young girl named Chihiro travels with her parents; the family stops at an abandoned amusement park, and mom and dad swiftly transform into pigs. Searching for a way to reverse her progenitors' magical condition, Chihiro heads to a spirit realm, where she finds new employment and a whole new identity at a bathhouse that is frequented by various elements of Japanese folklore (and might not really exist). 

The film's most iconic moments unfold during a quiet and particularly striking scene on a train where, technically, nothing happens. It's simple, beautiful and unforgettable. 

Rats get a bad rap. Of course, they deserve at least some of the blame for the Black Plague — the worst pandemic in global history — but that happened more than 700 years ago, so maybe it's time to show them some love.

"Ratatouille" went a long way towards rehabilitating the public image of rats, giving the creatures a heroic spin courtesy of Disney and Pixar. Patton Oswalt voices Remy — a Paris-residing gentlemen of the rat species who simply desires to eat substances designed specifically for consumption, rather than whatever he manages to scrounge up from the garbage. His quest for high-end people-food leads to a mishap that lands him a gig at a gourmet restaurant, but he must toil in secret due to the aforementioned anti-rodent discrimination. 

Years later, the film still has a deeply-loyal fanbase. A TikTok musical made headlines during the COVID-19 pandemic (ironic, because during this pandemic, people wanted to see a rat), and although talk of a sequel is speculative at best, for years it seemed like there'd never be another "Finding Nemo" either.

When audiences think about darkness and whimsy meshed together into elaborate cinematic adventures, they tend to think of Tim Burton — director of 1990's "Edward Scissorhands," 1999's "Sleepy Hollow" 1994's "Ed Wood," and several others. But with 2006's "Pan's Labyrinth," director Guillermo del Toro proved that he could do Burton's supernatural gloom and fairy tale wonder just as well as Tim Burton — maybe even better. 

Set during the 1940s in Francisco Franco's authoritarian Spain, this Spanish-language modern classic documents the tale of Ofelia — a young girl whose mother plans to marry fascist scumbag Captain Vidal. While staying at Vidal's compound, Ofelia discovers the titular labyrinth, meets Pan, and eventually comes across a humanoid monstrosity who eats faeries and keeps his eyeballs in the palms of his hands. Sound freaky? You bet it is.   

As stated at the onset, "fantasy" works out to be an extremely broad term. 

Case in point: This list began with "A New Hope" as the 27th-greatest fantasy film, and according to Metacritic's  ranking system, the number one fantasy film ever made is "Fanny and Alexander," a Swedish-language Ingmar Bergman movie the filmmaker originally intended to be his final, career capstone project. 

But perhaps Bergman and George Lucas aren't as far apart as some might assume, and "Fanny and Alexander" should have spawned a hugely-successful line of action figures. 

Released in 1982, "Fanny" is either three or five-and-a-half hours long, depending on which edit you happen to watch. Bergman's autobiographical epic touches upon the joys, horrors, and unique perspectives of childhood, while echoing any number of other stories involving wicked stepparents. 

Is it the most perfect fantasy film ever made? Better than "A New Hope," "ET" and "The Wizard of Oz"? Give the film a try, and you be the judge.