Back in those times, we all watch animations in the television. Things are different nowadays. They’re not only showing animations in the television but also in the theater. Not to mention some of them even become “classics” as well.

Team Empire has selected ten of the greatest animes of all time. Check it out!

Top 10 Anime

Madcap, astounding, non-linear, groundbreaking, awe-inspiring – put those together, and it spells Manga: the Japanese animation genre that for years now has been bringing animated movies to a whole new level of visual and, occasionally, thematic complexity, with maestros from Katsuhiro Otomo to Hayao Miyazaki putting in world class work on movies that are a million miles away from the likes of Shark Tale, Barnyard and sundry other soulless American animations. Yet, save for a select few titles, anime has rarely broken into the mainstream.

Yet, now with the release of Children Of Mana on the Nintendo DS, manga is coming into your home. An astonishing role-playing game designed in the manga tradition – characters with big eyes, and an anything-can-happen ambience are prominent – which allows you to embark on an epic adventure as one of four different characters. It’s so endearing and damned addictive that it’ll make you want to immerse yourself in the strange, transfixing world of manga.

So, to help you on your quest, we’ve put our heads together at Team Empire and come up with what we believe are the ten greatest animes of all time. Feel free to disagree on our forums!

10. Ninja Scroll
A fantastically violent manga thriller that pits a rogue ninja – and two eccentric helpers – against eight demon ninjas, each with varying powers, Ninja Scroll is one of the most influential animes, with its fight scenes and character designs reverberating through anime circles to this day. An orgy of near non-stop action, director Yoshiaki Kawajiri may not make total sense of the plot, but keeps things ticking along nicely, moving from one epic and brilliantly staged battle to the next with perfect aplomb.

09. Perfect Blue
A true original, Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is a reality-shifting thriller about a pop star with multiple personalities who has to find her true self in order to avoid a nasty serial killer. Focusing more on the psychological – although it does veer off into several hallucinatory episodes as Mima, the star, is haunted by a ghost of her old self, that expand the movie’s visual boundaries – than the fantastical, Perfect Blue is nonetheless absorbing and challenging.

08. Princess Mononoke
That man Miyazaki again, with a much more traditional anime than Spirited Away, but none the less equally powerful. Boundlessly imaginative and intriguing, Princess Mononoke concerns itself with a young prince who, after an encounter with a boar/snake demon, is forced to leave his domain behind and make a journey to find out why nature is going out of kilter; along the way, he meets colourful characters, a seemingly unstoppable demon god, and the flighty, feisty princess/spirit of the title. Beautifully drawn and emotionally affecting, this fairly soars – and it’s miles better than the similarly-themed Mulan. Take that, Disney!

07. Blood - The last vampire
Blending CGI animation with the traditional 2D so beloved of manga animators, Blood – The Last Vampire is a rather cool horror actioner, dripping in atmosphere and many, many gallons of blood as our heroine, Saya, takes on a bunch of bloodsucking badasses in a Japanese air force base in the mid-1960s. Brilliantly animated, the plot is a little baffling and deliberately oblique, but this wins points for its sheer style and verve: enough to win celebrity endorsements from the likes of James Cameron and Andy Wachowski.

06. Ghost in the shell
Another of the films that broke down the general public’s resistance to anime, Mamoru Oshii’s masterpiece is a complex and visually evocative existential discourse on the nature of humanity, as a cyborg who works for a government agency investigates a master criminal that can transfer its consciousness into other cyborgs. As memorable for its long tracts of heavy, meaningful dialogue about what it means to be human as the breathtaking action sequences, this is sci-fi with the old thinking cap on.

05. Vampire hunter D
We could probably lump this, the first true anime horror, in with its sequel, Vampire Hunter D: Blood Lust as part of a package deal, but let’s focus on the original, shall we? Made in 1985, and perhaps most famous for seemingly influencing the look of Stephen Sommers’ Van Helsing (perhaps that should read infamous, Vampire Hunter D is utterly barmy, but no less enjoyable for it, being the tale of a vampire hunter – with a hand possessed by a talking demon - in the far distant future who tries to save a young girl after she’s bitten by the local Count. Snake women, kinetic action scenes in the traditional manga style (ie the background is blurred to suggest movement), and an enigmatic hero: it may not make much sense, but you’ll be having too much fun to notice.

04. Grave of the Fireflies
For the uninitiated, manga is primarily about bonkers sci-fi, with machines that invariably turn into giant penises. But Grave Of The Fireflies exposes that as pure myth; this tender and heartbreaking tale tackles a subject close to Japanese hearts – the horror of the end of World War II – with sensitivity and grace, as a brother and sister try to survive in the ruins of a napalmed Kobe. Atmospheric and haunting, it’s near impossible to watch without getting a lump in the throat at some point.

03. Metropolis
Not the Fritz Lang silent movie classic, although if you can credit such a thing, this wondrous slice of anime comes close to recapturing that movie’s sense of marvel, sheer scale and giddy invention. Played out against the backdrop of an intricately detailed mega-city, Rintaro’s stupendous film, which actually correlates directly to Lang’s work, is a bittersweet sci-fi love story between a half-human android, and a young man who team up to crack a conspiracy to control the city. But as much as this touches the heart, it also assaults the eyes and ears in a rush of indelible images and sound: the climax, which plays out to the strains of Ray Charles ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’ is one of the greatest uses of music in any motion picture ever. Fact.

02. Spirited Away
It’s hard to put a list like this together without including at least one film directed by the master of animation, Hayao Miyazaki – and Spirited Away is the pinnacle of his achievements. A wonderfully imaginative fairy tale, Spirited Away is obviously influenced by Alice In Wonderland (it concerns a young girl who delves into a fantasy world populated by amazing creatures), but Miyazaki’s eye for the bizarre and beguiling, coupled with a level of detail that goes beyond the astonishing (Miyazaki draws many of the frames himself), makes Spirited Away Studio Ghibli’s finest effort.

01. AKIRA
The most famous Manga of them all is arguably the greatest and is the Manga film most likely to crop up in the DVD collections of those who claim they don’t ‘get’ the genre. Certainly, Katsuhiro Otomo’s seminal work, which details a horrific post-apocalyptic Tokyo in which a bike gang member becomes a terrifyingly powerful psionic after military experiments, has influenced the likes of the Wachowski Brothers and is a mind-blowing visual treat from start to finish.