Pinocchio, 1940. Directed by Walt Disney.

This is the pinnacle of Disney's animation output, containing as it does the lushest and most meticulous backgrounds and characters in any animated film ever made. It's also one of the great horror movies, possibly the best horror movie of the forties. The situation presented is a form of the Universal Nightmare, in which a lost child is beset on all sides by the forces of darkness. This works for children (who are occasionally scared witless by the sequences on Pleasure Island and with Monstro the Whale), but it works well for adults, too, who are able to envision their own child sent out into a world full of evil and taken from them. This is certainly the darkest movie Disney ever made, made moreso by the role of the audience's guide through the movie--Jiminy Cricket--who is not a character who panders to the audience. He is a lecher and a vagabond, hardly an upstanding citizen, who is Pinocchio's conscience by accident and who shirks his duties. Sure, he makes good in the end, but only after he sees the disaster caused by his own actions. Of all of Disney's cartoon features, this is the one which seems most like real and enduring art, the one in which the characters have feet of clay and suffer the pain of mere human beings. There is profound loneliness in this movie, especially in Gepetto, who longs to have a son of his own and whose plight is heart-wrenching once the son he has been given is taken from him. Pinocchio himself is carried deeper and deeper into alienation in his travels: imprisoned, mocked, and finally transported to a place which strips away one's very humanity. Only when he is swallowed up like Jonah in the Whale does he come to grips with what his irresponsibility has wrought. Not only does this have the look and feel of art, it has the look and feel of GREAT art.