What can be said about animation, at this point, other than that it’s pretty cool and stuff? Sometimes considered a genre, but more rightly (and frequently) held up as a medium nowadays, animation can do anything a live-action movie can do, and sometimes a little more. Like, just about any live-action movie could be remade with animation, but there are some animated movies (like Paprika and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) that would feel next-to-impossible to do in live-action.
Beyond how these movies look and feel, it’s also worth highlighting how well certain animated movies tell stories, with the ones below being highlighted because they have stories that end in particularly effective ways. These endings all come from animated films, and they’re all pretty much perfect. You can also be guaranteed of running into some spoilers below, since it’s otherwise a bit hard to talk about endings, you know?
10
‘Princess Mononoke’ (1997)
Some Hayao Miyazaki movies honestly just sort of end, and that might come down to his creative process and the way he sometimes begins a film without knowing how it’ll end. He has a “journey over the destination” approach to storytelling to a greater extent than most filmmakers, and it’s not even a problem necessarily, because his films are great throughout and do usually end well, but the ending is not often something that sticks out the most.
Maybe Princess Mononoke is the exception, in that regard. It’s probably got the most intricate and well-paced story out of any Miyazaki film, and so the conclusion ends up being particularly emotionally resonant and fitting. There’s a resolution to the film’s central conflict, but some consequences that unfold realistically to keep it from feeling like just a happy ending for the sake of having an ending that’s happy.
9
‘Marcel the Shell with Shoes On’ (2021)
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a hybrid animation and live-action film, so maybe it’s a little sneaky putting it here, but the majority of the characters are brought to life with stop-motion animation, and it just so happens that those animated characters exist in the real world. Marcel, the titular character, is just one inch tall, and he spends most of the movie trying to reconnect with the community of shells he used to belong to.
He finds them by the end, though his one shell companion for most of the film, his grandmother Connie, has passed away by that point, so the ending ends up being bittersweet. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On does genuinely make you care about a shell and the ups and downs of his life, which is impressive, considering how silly and/or lightweight the overall movie might sound on paper.
8
‘WALL·E’ (2008)
A defining Pixar movie that came out at a time when Pixar was putting out nothing but bangers (plus Cars), WALL·E starts perhaps more memorably than it ends, but it does still end incredibly regardless. That opening act does get plenty of adoration, since it plays out with relatively little dialogue and also not too many characters, being simultaneously funny in a silent film sort of way, and then also rather desolate and even post-apocalyptic in ways you don’t often see in family movies.
Things get a bit more hopeful when the “save the world and humanity’s future” part of the plot kicks into high gear, since WALL·E – the character and the movie – don’t just stay on Earth. But Earth’s returned to, after a hectic adventure in space, and it all feels well-earned and quite moving, being genuinely hopeful and all in a way that doesn’t feel convenient or cheesy.
7
‘Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio’ (2022)
To differentiate it from all the other Pinocchio movies out there, the one directed by Guillermo del Toro was understandably called Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio… though he had a co-director for this one, Mark Gustafson, whose efforts kind of get overshadowed, thanks to that title. Anyway, this is the story of Pinocchio, just with more of a dark fantasy spin to it, and the sorts of aesthetic and visual choices you might expect, thanks to the titular co-director.
The epilogue here is a little darker than you might expect, though, because Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio becomes a meditation on mortality, since Pinocchio – after getting a happy ending – is shown to eventually lose all his loved ones. He goes on without them, destined not to die, since he remains a wooden puppet, but hoping one day he’ll be able to see them all again eventually, in the afterlife… which would involve dying. It’s bold stuff for a kinda/sorta family film to end on.
6
‘Grave of the Fireflies’ (1988)
There is something bittersweet about the way Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio touches upon death with its ending, while with Grave of the Fireflies, it’s really just bitter. This is a movie about two young siblings trying to survive the final days of World War II, separate from the adults usually in their lives, which leads to inevitable tragedy which is still built to quite gradually throughout the movie’s entire runtime.
Grave of the Fireflies is essentially about the two children – reunited as ghosts – reflecting upon the final stage of their lives.
Death was always going to come at the end of such a story, as beyond it being about war and persistently downbeat, the narration at the start also spells it out, and Grave of the Fireflies is essentially about the two children – reunited as ghosts – reflecting upon the final stage of their lives. The final shot does show that Japan, as a whole, survived and rebuilt following the war’s devastation, but those who didn’t make it remain as ghosts, in either the literal or figurative sense.
5
‘It’s Such a Beautiful Day’ (2012)
To keep the heaviness going a little longer, It’s Such a Beautiful Day might be more existentially despairing than Grave of the Fireflies, not to mention more obscure and confounding at times, but there is also a balance of dark humor and tragedy here throughout. It’s got minimalist animation and a lack of dialogue outside a narrator who lays out protagonist Bill’s gradual physical and psychological deterioration, covering some of his memories throughout the whole thing, too.
It’s about Bill eventually dying, too, but the narrator seems in denial about such a death, and so either he – or, maybe, Bill himself – imagines sudden immortality, unpacking just what that would lead to, and how it would feel, until the collapse of the universe itself. Not that the rest of It’s Such a Beautiful Day wasn’t odd, profound, and highly memorable, but it’s this whole finale that really sticks out the most, and elevates an already great piece of oddball animation to genuine all-timer status.
4
‘Waltz with Bashir’ (2008)
One more soul-crushing film, Waltz with Bashir is interesting as far as animated movies go, since it’s also a documentary. Specifically, it’s a war documentary that also explores PTSD, with the director, Ari Folman, making himself the central subject. That choice is the most divisive part about Waltz with Bashir, because it doesn’t foreground the victims of a massacre, the event in question being one that the director – and other interviewees – have suppressed memories of.
The ending does forefront the horror of the event by switching from animated footage to live-action documentary footage of the aftermath, which reflects an understanding of what happened and a clarity, versus the haziness and frequent surrealism of the memories depicted with animation. You can get a very strong anti-war sentiment out of such an ending, or you can still feel like it doesn’t do justice to the people who need it. What it has to say about war and the way its consequences linger years or even decades later is powerful, though, and can be appreciated so long as you accept the film as a rather personal one that wants to focus most on introspection and memory.
3
‘Robot Dreams’ (2023)
Some of the high-rated one-liners that serve as reviews on Letterboxd can be frustrating, or even a bit shallow and off the mark at times, but two currently right up there on the page for Robot Dreams get it right, as one compares the film to Past Lives, and the other compares it to La La Land. Past Lives is about what could’ve been, and then the ending to La La Land is also about that.
And Robot Dreams does something similar, but without being derivative of either, since it’s about a dog and a robot being separated and wanting to reconnect, all before realizing that it might be too late to, and that they’ve moved on with others. It can be read as an exploration of a friendship or a romantic bond coming to an end, but the way it ultimately concludes in Robot Dreams is so hard-hitting and bittersweet, regardless of whether you saw the film as a romantic one or not.
2
‘The Lion King’ (1994)
The Lion King puts Simba through hell, by the standards of an animated/family movie, or really by the standards of any movie. That kind of comes about from the central conflict here being comparable to Hamlet, but Simba does a better job with the whole reclaiming what’s his thing. He’s got a murdered father and an evil uncle, but his story’s a more heroic and inspiring one than it is a tragedy.
That’s why it’s a little cheeky to call The Lion King an actual adaptation of Hamlet, but there are things to be compared, especially as far as the premise goes. The ending of The Lion King is undeniably triumphant, but all the catharsis is very well-earned, and then the final scene perfectly mirrors the opening one, the circle of life continuing, yada, yada, yada, it’s great. Obviously.
1
‘Toy Story 3’ (2010)
There are more stories about toys than just the first three Toy Story movies, since the whole franchise just looks as though it’s too profitable to genuinely conclude, but for a while, Toy Story 3 felt like the most appropriate conclusion possible. It is still a fantastic ending, from a certain point of view. That point of view just has to acknowledge Toy Story 3 concluding its own trilogy; the one focused on the toys and their relationship to Andy, if you will.
He gives them away at the end of Toy Story 3, before going off to college, and everyone makes peace with it in their own ways. It’s where things had to go, with the series and its characters growing older as time in real life passed, too, but predictability didn’t stop anything from being emotional here. It’s the quintessential Pixar ending, the same way the beginning of Up is the quintessential Pixar opening scene, and so it feels sensible to put Toy Story 3 here, at the end of all things.
Toy Story 3
- Release Date
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June 18, 2010
- Runtime
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103 minutes
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Tim Allen
Buzz Lightyear (voice)
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