Since Toy Story 3 came out three summers ago, animation powerhouse Pixar has taken more hits both from both critics and audiences than any other time the company’s history. It used to be that the highest compliment you could pay a movie from a rival studio is that it was “Pixar-esque.” Here’s a sampling of movies that have come out during Pixar’s reign that live up to the quality that Luxo Jr. represents.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (2009; dir. Phil Lord/Chris Miller)

It’s hard to turn children’s books into great movies. Getting the look and feel right is easy enough, but capturing the spirit of the words and fleshing it out to feature length takes something special. Among the best to do this are Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are and Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. The movie’s pace is frenetic, but Lord and Miller make sure to lace the comedy with enough heart and character to make the whole thing sing.

Rango (2011; dir. Gore Verbinski)

This is a tricky beast. It’s animated, so people automatically label it as a kid’s movie, but it’s anything but. The bulk of the humor skews toward adults, not really in a risqué way, but in an intelligent and experienced way that younger crowds just aren’t equipped for. Also, Rango gets the best performance that Johnny Depp has given in at least the last decade.

South Park (1999; dir. Trey Parker/Matt Stone)

The only difference between Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s South Park movie and the long-running TV show is the unfettered use of choice profanities. Sometimes being able to do whatever you want just leads to self-indulgence, but here it leads to something epic in scope and success. This movie has it all: Operation Human Shield, rapping Canadians, and mysteries of the female anatomy.

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012; dir. Don Hertzfeldt)

Don Hertzfeldt’s triptych is a curio. Made up of three short films put together, it charts the daily routine of Bill, who may also have a serious mental disorder. It’s darkly funny and seriously introspective. The juxtaposition of Hertzfeldt’s surrealism and stick-figure characters is stark, but brutally efficient. The standout section that gives the feature its name is pretty incredible, putting the audience through an emotional gauntlet. You’ll be amazed at how much you’ll come to care about and sympathize with a stick-figure.

The Iron Giant (1999; dir. Brad Bird)

Brad Bird’s film doesn’t forgo the route of moralizing that most animated films do, but the realization of being something greater than the sum of one’s parts has a lot more riding on it than in most animated films. Hogarth Hughes spends the better part of the film bonding with a clumsy giant space robot that eats people’s cars when they aren’t looking and causes a train wreck. Hogarth teaches him about American pop culture (most notably, and poignantly, Superman) then government agent Kent Mansley (voiced by Christopher McDonald) arrives bound and determined to find and rid the small town on Rockwell, Maine of the metal menace. About 50 or so minutes into the film, the Iron Giant is revealed to be a defense weapon, his systems triggered by Hogarth’s toy ray gun, and previously kept at bay by a dent in the dome that allowed for a convenient fit of movie-related amnesia. At first, it’s hard to believe that the awesomely destructive capabilities of the Giant are solely defensive, but when the right people finally get the message the film’s moral imperative finally comes into play: you don’t have to be a gun.

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The Giant learns, rebuilds itself, and saves people. But the Giant is no mere gun and the statement “you don’t have to be a gun” isn’t just a reminder that he can learn to be something else, it’s that he is something else, and it becomes a much more immediate statement of purpose and destiny because an overzealous government agent has launched a nuclear missile at the Giant’s location. A location that either condemns an entire town to die, or requires the heroic sacrifice of our title character. The Giant’s last word is “Superman.” The choice he makes is the farthest thing from a mystery that any of us have ever had to imagine. He came to us from another world, he was better than us, and in his final moments, however briefly, he showed us the light. And the light is goddamn beautiful.

Spirited Away (2001; dir. Hayao Miyazaki)

It’s really hard to pick any movie out of the Studio Ghibli line-up and say it’s the best, but hands down Spirited Away is by far the most creative and magical out of all the films the great Hayao Miyazaki has graciously given to the world of superb animation. Possibly the most successful Japanese film of all time, Spirited Away dives you into an alternate reality that is so mind-bogglingly creative. It follows young girl Chihiro Ogino, who is moving to a new neighborhood very reluctantly. After taking a wrong turn to their new house, the family finds themselves in a magical world that her father persistently insists on exploring. While her parents eat themselves silly at a restaurant stall, Chihiro explores a nearby bathhouse where she meets a young boy her age named Haku, who warns her to return to her car across the river before sundown. However, this information is told to Chihiro too late and by sunset her parents are turned into grotesque pigs, leaving them trapped in the spirit world.

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Spirited Away spins the classic coming of age story twist that Lewis Carroll once took, without the creepy pedophile vibe. Its alternate universe creates a reality where the viewer can watch this young, 10-year-old girl go from a misunderstanding child to a rational and hopeful adult. Alone without parents, she must find herself in a strange world where old men have spider-like arms and an old witch Yubaba has the ability to seize her name. The film is also highly adored because of its commentary on the modern Japanese society and its struggle to modernize in a global society while also keeping its beloved but dissolving traditions. James and the Giant Peach (1996; dir. Henry Selick)

Henry Selick has a talent of adapting the creepiest children’s books into the craziest stop motion adventures. It’s really hard not to fall in love with parentless children who are being raised by terrible relatives. Moreover, once you add the element of magic all bets are off and you have yourself an excellent story. What Selick does with Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach is wondrous and fantastical, translating one of the greatest children writer’s best books onto the big screen. We follow orphaned James as he travels across the ocean to the city of dreams, New York City, in a marvelously giant peach with a gang of oversized bugs.

Selick transforms ugly bugs into warm, tender friends. James, who has never felt an ounce of kindness since his parents were killed by a mysterious Rhino, becomes family with this odd bunch of characters, faults and all. What really brings this film to life though is the soundtrack work done by the ever talented Randy Newman. Beginning with sweet ballad “My Name is James” onto the heart-warming and upbeat “Family,” Newman takes the stop motion to new heights with his talent for bringing out the core values of the story in song form. James and the Giant Peach is a wonderful follow up to the ever-amazing The Nightmare Before Christmas, and is one of Selick and Disney’s best collaborations.Coraline (2009; dir. Henry Selick)

Another Henry Selick favorite, Coraline is one of the darkest, most surprising animated films of the millennia. While children’s films usually are quite happy and stick to relatively pleasant themes, Selick pours heart into a not so traditional story about a bratty girl who moves away from her hometown in Michigan to a dreary, pink boarding house in Oregon. In this strange house she discovers a tunnel late at night that leads her to a bright alternate reality of her new home. There her dad is silly and plays all the time instead of doing tedious work on the computer, and her mother cooks warm, welcoming meals for a change rather than berating Coraline about her stubbornness and all around whiny attitude. Even the annoying neighbor kid Wybie has lost the ability to speak in this world.

It’s seemingly perfect; the only difference is that in this world everyone has buttons for eyes. The lesson of loving the people that surround you that Coraline teaches resonates with children as well as adults. Furthermore, like much of Selick’s work the film is all done in beautiful stop motion, which brings color and liveliness to the dark film about a girl losing herself to a seemingly perfect reality. The film’s a reminder that even classic animation techniques can stand on their own in a business where CGI films have flooded the market.Monster House (2006; dir. Gil Kenan)

Gil Kenan’s “Monster House” could’ve easily been just a little something akin to producer Robert Zemeckis’ The ‘Burbs but luckily it’s not content with just being the same old story about the weird house in a normal neighborhood. It has powerful things to say about the fleeting, powerful, impermanent nature of love. The audience gets their first whiff when DJ calls his best bud, Chowder, over after receiving a mysterious phone call from the house of Nebbercracker, who is believed dead from a heart attack he suffered earlier that day. When DJ asks Chowder if his parents are home, he responds: “My dad’s at the pharmacy and my mom’s at the movies with her personal trainer.” That doesn’t sound like things are good on the home front. Every house has a secret behind the picture perfect façade, and some of those secrets like Nebbercracker’s are buried deeper.

The secret behind the titular Monster House is that Nebbercracker fell in love with Constance, a 500 lb. sideshow of a woman, whose life was defined by ridicule, and living in a cage. Nebbercracker promised her a safe place when he whisked her away from the circus, he genuinely loved her, but still he had to transport her in her cage (a small, but not unimportant, detail). And the house he vowed to build for her wasn’t completed before she died. She died in the basement, her anger at always being caged and ridiculed fused with all of the broken dreams that the Nebbercracker house now represented. The house became malevolent and Nebbercracker became a bitter, scary old man. He’d forgotten the most essential part of loving someone until the end, however soon and unfair that end may be: remembering to lose them. It’s not a particularly hopeful message, but Nebbercracker isn’t dead, he has a whole rest of his life to live. Nobody said that he had to come to that realization the easy way either. But the filmmakers do the journey up pretty damn nicely.