Best Animated Movies Made for Adults, Not Kids

Psychological thrillers

Perfect Blue (1997, dir. Satoshi Kon, 81 minutes). A pop singer quits her idol group to become an actress, then is stalked by an obsessive fan and starts losing track of what's real. Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan owes it a clear debt. Contains sexual violence.

Paprika (2006, dir. Satoshi Kon, 90 minutes). A device that lets therapists enter patients' dreams is stolen, and dreams start spilling into the waking world. Dazzling, and often compared with Inception.

War and history

Grave of the Fireflies (1988, dir. Isao Takahata, 89 minutes). A teenage boy and his little sister try to survive alone after the firebombing of Kobe in 1945. Ghibli's most painful film, and one of the great anti-war films in any medium.

Waltz with Bashir (2008, dir. Ari Folman, 90 minutes). Folman interviews fellow veterans to recover his memories of the 1982 Lebanon War and the Sabra and Shatila massacre. An animated documentary, nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Persepolis (2007, dir. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, 96 minutes). Satrapi's own story, from childhood during the Iranian Revolution to exile in Europe, adapted from her graphic novels. Funny, angry and moving.

Flee (2021, dir. Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 90 minutes). A man known as Amin tells, for the first time, how he escaped Afghanistan as a child. It was the first film nominated for the Oscars for documentary, animated and international feature at once.

Quiet heartbreak

Anomalisa (2015, dir. Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, 90 minutes). A customer-service author in a hotel hears every other person with the same voice, until he meets Lisa. A stop-motion film about loneliness, with puppets that make it stranger and sadder. Contains a sex scene.

Mary and Max (2009, dir. Adam Elliot, 92 minutes). An eight-year-old in Melbourne picks a name from a New York phone book and starts a 20-year pen friendship with a lonely, middle-aged man with Asperger's. Funny, bleak and very tender.

Sci-fi spectacle

Akira (1988, dir. Katsuhiro Otomo, 124 minutes). In Neo-Tokyo, a biker gang member gains terrifying psychic powers. Hand-drawn on a scale few films have matched, and violent. It shaped decades of anime and Western sci-fi.

Our verdict

If you've only seen family animation, start with Persepolis: accessible, funny and serious. Then Perfect Blue, and save Grave of the Fireflies for when you're ready for it.

Frequently asked questions

Is Grave of the Fireflies a children's film? No. It's a Studio Ghibli film, but it's a devastating story about two children starving in wartime Japan, and most viewers find it one of the saddest films they've seen.

Are there funny animated movies for adults? Yes. Sausage Party (2016) is a crude R-rated comedy, and Mary and Max mixes dark humour with real tenderness.

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