First, not that kind of adult.

Here I am, sitting in a guesthouse in Tórshavn (that would be the capital of Faroe Islands, a town with a whopping 14k people) that functions as a student dormitory during the semester and somehow this idea for a post pops in my head. No idea why. This isn’t a sly joke or anything. I just found it weird I came up with this idea when looking at the skeletons of a pilot whale and an orca hanging from the ceiling of the National Museum. The problem with this is that I can’t rewatch any of these right now, so this is based on my memories of these movies (which has been waning, but here we are).

But why do we tend to think of animations as children’s entertainment? There is nothing inherently child-like in animation. It is just another production method or, more precisely, a set of methods.

Here’s the reason: Walt Disney used to make movies for families. Those movies were time-consuming and thus expensive to make, so they wanted to appeal to everyone and considering how lasting legacy those early movies have had (the five first features were Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi). As they were doing this, they were constantly developing new methods to streamline their process and simultaneously get a higher quality. They wanted to be known as a reliable source of entertaining movies. There were others as well. Tom and Jerry, Loonie Tunes and so forth.

But others weren’t as interested. Others saw an opportunity use those methods those people created to make cheap shit, because they had a specific audience in mind: kids. Kids just weren’t that discerning and when in the 80s certain restrictions regarding marketing to children were lifted (thanks, Reagan) combined with the rise of affiliated toys, it made making cheap animation highly lucrative. Hence, shit. This is regrettable, since I know there still are movies out there that miss on an audience, because they just assume that animation is just for kids, even though Disney, Pixar and even DreamWorks have been making movies for the whole family all this time. Well, as long as they’ve been around. That’s just the US. Then there’s also, of course, various Japanese animations.

The Japanese are very well represented here, those aforementioned studios not so much. That should not come as a surprise to anyone, as Japanese never gave up on these movies.

I tried to avoid family movies, so these tend to include themes that are generally only interesting to adults. Sometimes it is hard to figure out where the line is, but I’ll talk about that more alongside the movies that were hard to be sure of. Of course, there is no official stance, so I can just be the final arbiter with no repercussions.

So, here we go, in no particular order:

Akira (1988)

A member of a teenage biker gang is taken over by the spirit of Akira, an extremely powerful being of unknowable nature who destroyed Tokyo. Now Neo-Tokyo is also under threat and it’s up to some kids to try to save it.

Dystopian visions of the future are becoming very topical in our current world and Akira is no different, although we are having threats I don’t think most dystopias ever predicted, like AI making everyone stupid and requiring so much energy that the climate is fucked. Still, we have apocalyptic cults around technology, militarism, a police state, government surveillance and so forth.

This was my gateway drug to Japanese animation, although it took quite a bit of time before I was able to get my hands on much more than this with DVDs being in the distant future when I first saw this.

Mononoke-hime (Princess Mononoke, 1995)

The least family Miyazaki. This is quite violent, but I like the world building and it also works nicely as a metaphor for what is happening in our world.

Allegro non troppo (1976)

This is a parody of Fantasia. They are not shy about it as Disney is mentioned multiple times during the film. If you know what Fantasia is, this is that, except funnier and weirder. Much weirder.

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

I guess this is pretty hard to find as it still seems to be relatively obscure. Of course, it is also a hard sell. The simplistic art on the cover is not going to entice a random person to buy this. Not that they will see this anywhere, because it isn’t available very widely.

The next problem is that the movie is about a man losing his mind because of an unnamed disease affecting his brain. The movie goes deep here. Also, back when I made my list of best endings, this was an easy part of that list.

Belladonna of Sadness (Kanashimi no Beradonna, 1973)

The Japanese domination of this list continues (there’s actually two more).

The animation (if you can call that) is very simple here. It’s just paintings and the camera panning, zooming and rotating them. Well, there’s an exception. The Devil is fully animated… flaccid penis. Yes. Really.

The movie is about society pushing women into being witches by not letting women have control over their lives. And that’s where the devil comes in.

Paprika (2006)

Besides having a lot of Japanese movies (like this one), this list also has a lot of movies that are part of the 366 Weird Movies Canonical List (like this one at 82) or the Apocrypha.

There’s technology used by therapists that allows people to enter the minds of others. So, what happens when that gets into the wrong hands? It gets pretty wild.

Mad God (2021)

This was over 30 years in the making. Phil Tippett, the writer/director, is a special effects artist with an Oscar (for Jurassic Park) and five other Oscar nominations, but he would make this film on his free time mostly with students who wanted experience in this kind of animation. There’s a single scene which took three years to complete.

Was it worth it? From the viewer point of view, yes. It doesn’t have much of a story, but as a sheer experience it’s very visceral. It all happens in a world that is pretty indescribable.

Mary and Max. (2009)

I almost forgot the period from the end of the name of the movie.

This is mostly just a sweet movie about an 8-year-old in Australia, who becomes a pen pal of an adult man in New York. The animation style is very unusual, but works in this context. I feel this was very underseen for ages, but now seems to have found an audience.

Grave of Fireflies (Hotaru no haka, 1988)

Always topical, but you just don’t see this side of war in the news: This is about two siblings trying to survive in Japan during the War. At points it’s joyous, but obviously it’s much more poignant.

Persepolis (2007)

Again, quite topical. It begins in 1979 during the revolution in Iran.

This is an autobiographical film by Marjane Satrapi based on her comics of the same name. She lives in Iran, gets out to study in Europe and sees the differences between these two ways of life.

The style is very much based on her comics, which makes it pretty simple, but also, you don’t really need anything too complicated for such a personal movie.