Animated movies are often thought of as being for kids, but they are usually done well enough to be enjoyed by all generations, so long as you don’t have to watch them over and over again.

However, that doesn’t mean that the movies are cheap. They cost hundreds of thousands to even millions of dollars easily.

The Tale of Princess Kaguya - Most Expensive Anime

     Toho

The Tale of Princess Kaguya is a unique animation. Based on a traditional fairy tale about a bamboo cutter, this movie was written and directed by Studio Ghibli in Japan.

While technically, the art is hand-drawn, it is done so on a computer system, and the coloring is added digitally as well.

The creators wanted the art style to be reminiscent of traditional sumi-e watercolor paintings that are largely found in Japan, which is why they went for a more hand-drawn style compared to their other animations.

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With it being hand-drawn, you may expect it to cost less than other animations, but it is actually the most expensive animated movie, to date. This is because of the time. Since it takes longer to hand-draw each panel, rather than relying on computers to do it, the animation budget was a lot higher.

Though the animation and story are beautiful, the movie did not make back its budget at the box office. While many people took this to mean that it had bombed, it was really because, although it did well, the movie was so expensive that even standard viewing rates weren’t enough. After all, the most expensive animated movie to date before that was Ponyo, also by Studio Ghibli, which cost almost $20 million less than The Tale of Princess Kaguya.

Missing Link - Most Expensive Stop Motion Animation

     Annapurna Pictures

Stop-motion also counts as an animation style. Stop-motion includes movies like Coraline, Corpse Bride, Wallace & Gromit, and so on. However, none of these are the most expensive. That title goes to a movie created in 2019, called Missing Link. Laika is the studio that created the movie, and is well-known for its stop animations.

Unfortunately, despite being a trusted and liked company that focuses on children’s movies, this one was considered a bomb. The movie cost an estimated $100 million to make. This is $32 million over the next most expensive movie, Little Prince by ON Animation Studios, and $40 million more than the next most expensive movies also produced by Laika, which were Coraline, ParaNorman, The BoxTrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings.

This was a big jump in animation costs for the studio that just didn’t pan out well. While the movie did get pretty decent reviews, having a little below a 7 on IMDB, it didn’t get more than $27 million at the box office.

The company doesn’t seem terribly disappointed, as they know you can’t win them all.

Treasure Planet - Most Expensive Traditional Animation

     Buena Vista Pictures Distribution

The next category is traditional animation. While Treasure Planet is considered the most expensive traditional animation, it does push the limits of what is considered traditional.

Traditional animation is often considered to be hand-drawn animation. It also is known as classical animation, cel animation, or hand-drawn animation. Each frame is drawn by hand on paper and was the standard style until computer animation grew.

While it does have traditional cel animation, it blends it with CG animation, primarily for the backgrounds. Many animators tried to do this mix around the time Treasure Planet was coming out, but not many had success. The blending of the two methods didn’t always work well, but thanks to the Sci-Fi setting of the movie, it managed to do pretty well.

Treasure Planet was done by Disney Studio in 2002, with an estimated budget of $140 million. This just beat out Tarzan by $10 million, and Atlantis: The Lost Empire by $20 million.

The Lion King (2019) - Most Expensive Ever, Tied

     Walt Disney Studios

No, we aren’t talking about the original Lion King movie. While it was a great movie, it only cost $45 million for Disney to make.

Instead, we are talking about the 2019 live-action remake of Lion King. The budget was an estimated $260 million.

There are plenty of other live-action movies out there, primarily led by Disney. However, most of them are truly live-action, using a mix of people and CGI elements. However, the Lion King live-action instead was fully animated, using a mix of motion capture, virtual reality, and augmented reality technology.

To put all of that confusing jargon into more simplistic terms, essentially Lion King was made with a computer engine designed to produce video games more than movies.

We saw a little of this in the movie Life of Pi, with the animals all being animated. It was the first step in this movement of making incredibly realistic animation. However, even it only had partial CGI mixed with live-action, whereas The Lion King was only animation, and some of the most detailed CGI work we have seen to date.

This movie may be expensive, but being one of Disney’s most popular films, there isn’t much chance of it bombing. It is also a step into a new evolution of filmmaking and art design.

Tangled - Most Expensive Ever, Tied

With the amazing work that went into The Lion King, you might expect it to be the most expensive, but it is actually tied with another movie by Disney, Tangled. Though Tangled is more closely related to Disney’s original art style rather than the new design of The Lion King, their budget was the same, at $260 million.

The difference was that Tangled’s budget wasn’t only due to animation. The movie was stopped and started a couple of times, going through different names and different story plots that eventually were all scrapped. Tests were also done to make sure that Tangled could achieve the look that the directors and producers wanted as well while still looking nice and running smoothly.

However, without the stops, the movie would have likely been a lot cheaper, running close to $150 million to $200 million, which puts it on par with other Disney movies coming out at the same time.