Last night Channel 4 showed the latest of their ‘100 Greatest’ series, unsurprisingly fronted by Jimmy Carr, the 100 Greatest Cartoons. It should perhaps have been titled something more akin to the 100 Greatest Animations since it’s debatable whether 3D animation and more mature animation like Akira and Fritz The Cat (using “mature” in the loosest possible sense of the word in that case), but the results were interesting.

The Simpsons was an obvious choice for number one and I don’t think anyone expected anything else to win, but I really didn’t expect the public to vote the likes of Family Guy, Spirited Away, The Iron Giant, Akira, Ren & Stimpy, and Princess Mononoke to get such relatively high positions. Shrek didn’t deserve its high placing (watch it in ten years and see how badly it’s dated thanks to the overdone pop culture references) and I’d question whether The Incredibles would place so high if it wasn’t fresh in the mind, but I was definitely impressed with how we represented our taste in animation. Tally ho!