Pixar's 5 Best Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes

The best thing about Pixar Animation Studios, one of the most acclaimed American animation studios in history, is that it makes really, really great movies that also happen to be geared towards children. As an elder millennial (born in 1990), I was part of the target audience for the studio's first-ever release, "Toy Story," which became the first entirely computer-animated movie when it hit theaters in 1995. Reader, I was hooked. Well into adulthood, I kept seeing Pixar movies — including, yes, when the company was purchased by Disney in 2006 — so that I could laugh, experience childlike wonder, and have weird, inappropriate emotional outbursts in public places. (One time, I was watching "Up" on a seven-hour Megabus ride and started crying so loudly that the guy sitting behind me changed seats. That's right. Behind me.)

Since its inception, Pixar has made some of the most culturally relevant, iconic, and beloved movies of the 20th and 21st centuries. So which, according to the critics, are the very best ones? I looked to a Rotten Tomatoes ranking of every Pixar film to find answers, and find them I did, even if I felt like some of them were unsatisfactory. (How, and I mean how, did the environmentalist space epic "WALL-E" not make it into the top 10?!) Still, my misgivings and quibbles aside, the top 5 entries on this list are unimpeachably great ... and if you somehow haven't seen any of these Pixar classics, let me convince you. Here are the five best Pixar movies according to their Rotten Tomatoes rankings.

Sequels often get a bad rap; "Cars 2" is, in fact, all the way at the bottom of the Pixar ranking list according to Rotten Tomatoes. But the same definitely can't be said of the "Toy Story" franchise. Thanks to the 2026 release of "Toy Story 5," which earned rave reviews from critics (including /Film's own BJ Colangelo), the franchise is still going strong ... and on some level, it's easy to imagine that it's still a huge success thanks to 2010's "Toy Story 3."

This threequel, which stands at 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, follows up with our favorite sentient toys introduced in the first film, including cowboy Woody (Tom Hanks), astronaut Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack), just to name a few. Unfortunately, as their owner Andy (John Morris) gets ready to head to college and leave his childhood bedroom behind, the fate of the toys feels in flux ... especially because Andy takes Woody with him but puts the rest of the toys in a storage bag intended for the attic, only for his mother to put the bag out by the curb.

Eventually, the toys — except Woody — end up donated to a daycare center, where they do not have a very good time under the strict rule of Lots-O'-Huggin' Bear, or Lotso (Ned Beatty). From there, Woody finds his way to the daycare and helps his friends escape, and despite a genuinely harrowing sequence where the toys accept their death in a fiery trash compactor, they find their way back to Andy. If you don't cry when Andy individually introduces all of his beloved childhood toys to a young girl named Bonnie (Emily Hahn), you're dead inside.

There are so many great casting choices in Pixar's illustrious history, but for my money, not a single one of them is better than Amy Poehler, a ray of sunshine in human form, voicing the literal concept of joy. In Pete Doctor's masterful "Inside Out" (98% on Rotten Tomatoes), we zoom inside the head of a girl named Riley Andersen (Kaitlyn Dias), who moves from Minnesota to California when she's 11 years old, and inside, we meet her core emotions. Joy (Poehler) essentially runs the show as the first core emotion to show up, though she was followed quickly by Sadness ("The Office" alum Phyllis Smith) and then, later on, by Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader), and Disgust (Mindy Kaling). (Hader and Kaling were recast in the 2024 sequel "Inside Out 2" with Tony Hale and Liza Lapira, which is a shame; they're so well-deployed here.)

As Riley tries to adjust to her new life, her emotions start getting darker and more complex, utterly baffling Joy. When Joy and Sadness get into a scuffle over core memories and are sucked into a tube that transports them to a different part of Riley's mind, they have to find their way back to the control center so that Anger, Disgust, and Fear don't run the show and cause Riley to do something irreversible. "Inside Out" is, without question, one of the coolest movies ever made — for kids or adults. Not only does it pretty faithfully capture concepts about how the human brain functions, but "Inside Out" is a touching, universal story about what it's like to grow up. On top of that, it also features one of the saddest characters in Pixar's history — don't ever bring up Bing Bong if you see me in public.

There's a well-worn trope in Disney movies where one of the protagonist's parents (usually the mother) dies early in the hero's life, leaving the main character's dad to fend for himself. The trajectory, from that point, usually focuses on the motherless child exclusively ... which is not true of "Finding Nemo," a brilliant take on a familiar story that shows us the perspectives of father Marlin (Albert Brooks) and son Nemo (Alexander Gould) as they desperately try to find their way back to one another. After a barracuda attack kills Marlin's wife Coral (Elizabeth Perkins) and leaves him with just one precious fish egg, Marlin becomes a helicopter parent to his son Nemo, even as Nemo struggles against his father's overprotective nature. When Nemo wants to go on a school trip involving a portion of the open sea, Marlin forbids him from going, but Nemo goes anyway ... only for Nemo to get captured by scuba divers as he tries to bravely show off for his friends.

While Marlin is aided by his new forgetful friend Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), a blue tang fish with a short-term memory problem, Nemo finds himself in a dentist's fish tank surrounded by allies, including the grizzled fish Gill (Willem Dafoe). Thanks to creatures like sea turtles, sharks, and even pelicans, Nemo finds his way back to Marlin ... but the journey is well worth experiencing for yourself, even if you might want to make sure you've got tissues handy. "Finding Nemo" still has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and it's easy to understand why.

The movie that set an eternal standard not just for Pixar films but the animated genre as a whole, 1995's "Toy Story" is still one of the best movies the studio has ever made a whopping three decades later. The very first conflict in the "Toy Story" franchise isn't necessarily about growing up or any big life changes, like we see in the sequels; it's simply about a new toy in town stealing attention away from Woody. The toy in question? Buzz Lightyear, who thinks he's a very real intrepid space explorer and not a plastic toy who repeats the catchphrase "To infinity and beyond!"

After Woody sabotages Buzz so that he can't "join" Andy on a family trip to Pizza Planet, the two end up having a scuffle in the family car and fall out and are left stranded until they're able to hop into a Pizza Planet delivery truck. From there, they experience a full-blown odyssey trying to get home to Andy, even finding themselves held somewhat captive by Sid (Erik von Detten), a sadistic neighborhood boy who finds pleasure in tearing his own toys to pieces. There's a reason that "Toy Story" still holds a perfect rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes after all this time. What is sort of surprising is that its direct sequel lays claim to the top spot ... but that's because it's just that good.

"The Godfather Part II." "The Empire Strikes Back." "Toy Story 2." Every single one of these titles can, indisputably, say that they're some of the best sequels ever made, and that's why "Toy Story 2" leads the pack on this list with another perfect 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (You might notice that the only two entries in the "Toy Story" franchise with said perfect ratings are the first two outings.) Following up on the events of "Toy Story," the second movie in this beloved franchise reunites us with Andy's gang of toys ... and after butting heads in the first film, Woody and Buzz are now basically co-presidents of the group. When Woody's arm rips during some rough playtime, Andy's mom puts him on a shelf so she can repair him, but then Woody starts to worry that he might end up discarded; unfortunately, he ends up at a yard sale where he's stolen by an overzealous toy collector.

Unbeknownst to Woody, he was always part of a set based on a 1950s TV show ... and when he's at the collector's house, he meets cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack), her horse Bullseye, and prospector Stinky Pete (Kelsey Grammer), who are excited to see him because it means the collector can sell them, as a set, to a Japanese museum. Ultimately, Buzz and the other toys band together and ultimately rescue Woody, Jessie and Bullseye, and defeat Stinky Pete's efforts to complete said sale. "Toy Story 2" is a triumph, and it's not surprising that it's Pixar's highest rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes.

All of these movies, along with the rest of the Pixar catalog, are streaming on Disney+.