From 2000 to the present, animated films have become ubiquitous, increasingly experimental in their narrative construction and visual language, and critically acclaimed. The 21st century has done a lot of kindness for the animated medium, offering its particular pleasures to audiences of all ages. Computer generated imagery definitely became the technique du jour, but many of our pioneers continued to mess with the form's tired-and-true methods of hand-drawn or stop-motion animation, resulting in an influx of interesting animated auteurs. To celebrate these modern masterpieces of crat and imagination, we've got the 45 best animated …