Cartoons are often unfairly considered just to be for kids, but there is a rich and ongoing history of animation that is not for children. There are countless great animated movies for adults, and more and more are made every year as the medium escapes what's sometimes known as the "animation age ghetto"—the ignorant assumption that any cartoon must be like a Disney movie, regardless of its content.
These are 32 of the best animated movies that aren't for kids. A lot of these films are Japanese, as the country has a robust tradition of anime geared towards adults. Really, it's only been since the 2000s that America has started to see adult animation flourish as the idea of "cartoons for grown-ups" becomes more mainstream. Some adult animated movies are decidedly for adults only, whether they feature mature themes, explicit language, violence, or all of the above. Other films are adult in the sense that there's simply not a lot in them that would capture the attention of a kiddie viewer.
There are also movies that are not for kids but that a teenager might enjoy, and then there's the very real category of cartoons that are for all ages. For the most part, though, this list of films contains titles that you'd want to watch after the kids are asleep.
32. Team America: World Police
Year: 2004
Director: Trey Parker
South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone turned to puppetry for this raunchy comedy that skewered the Bush era and the Global War on Terror. Using a similar marionette animation style as the cult classic '60s show Thunderbirds, Team America: World Police followed the titular agency as they fought terrorism around the globe—regardless of what other countries might want. It's simultaneously a sharp satire of militarism and geopolitics and a proudly stupid, explicit comedy.
31. Unicorn Wars
Year: 2022
Director: Alberto Vázquez
This Spanish war film follows a group of cuddly teddy bears as they go to battle against unicorns. Despite the cutesy nature of the characters, the violence and depravity of the conflict are extreme and over-the-top, and the contrast between the character designs and the bloodshed might at first make Unicorn Wars seem like it really only has that one joke. However, it's a very effective joke, and there are serious themes exploring militarism, religion, and fascism to be found.
30. The Animatrix
Year: 2003
Directors: Andy Jones, Mahiro Maeda, Shinichirō Watanabe, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Takeshi Koike, Kōji Morimoto, and Peter Chung
Released to coincide with the first two sequels to The Matrix, this animated spin-off of the live-action films is an anthology that tells nine stories that expand the cyberpunk world. A few, like Kids Story and Final Flight of the Osiris, more directly tie into the live-action films. The highlight, though, is The Second Renaissance, a two-part recounting of the machine war that led to humanity's downfall and the creation of the Matrix, the digital prison that the remaining people were trapped in. The Second Renaissance is haunting, filled with historical and artistic allusions that make this sci-fi future feel that much more real.
29. Watership Down
Year: 1978
Director: Martin Rosen
This adaptation of Richard Adams' 1972 novel might ostensibly be a children's film, but countless kids who watched the rabbit-on-rabbit violence and were traumatized might disagree. Watership Down, a British film, is certainly more mature than any Disney movie of the era, following a group of bunnies as they flee the destruction of their warren and attempt to find a new home for themselves. Children could certainly watch Watership Down and indeed there's a case to be made that its frank maturity makes it worthwhile for young audiences. The adults putting it on just need to make sure the kids know what they're getting into. That, or they should just watch by themselves.
28. The Tower
Year: 2016
Director: Keith Maitland
On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman went to the top of the main tower on the University of Texas campus and started indiscriminately shooting at the people below, killing 15 and injuring more than 30 others in what was the most deadly mass shooting in American history at the time. This documentary, which blends some live-action footage with rotoscoped recreations of the survivors recounting their experience, is a very unique film that looks at an infamous historical incident of the sort that's become all too common since.
27. The Simpsons Movie
Year: 2007
Director: David Silverman
It took 18 seasons, but everyone's favorite animated yellow family made the jump from the small screen to the big screen when The Simpsons Movie premiered in theaters in 2007. Although the film premiered a few years after the point when most fans agree the TV show has peaked in quality, it's a very enjoyable romp that makes good use of the expanded budget and runtime, following the Simpsons after Homer accidentally gets Springfield trapped in a giant dome. D'oh!
26. The Wolf House
Year: 2018
Directors: Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña
A deeply upsetting and uniquely animated stop-motion film, this Chilean horror movie follows a little girl named María who has been exiled from the colony where she lives. Avoiding a wolf in the woods, she soon takes shelter in a house, only for increasingly ominous and threatening events to occur as the house and its inhabitants change. The Wolf House looks like few other movies do, beautiful and ugly at once, as it explores cults and the sorts of circumstances that could make a person embrace fascism, as the plot is inspired by a dark fairy tale version of some of Chile's own history with Nazism.
25. Ninja Scroll
Year: 1993
Director: Yoshiaki Kawajiri
One of the most influential anime movies ever made—especially in terms of popularizing the medium in the West—Ninja Scroll is a proudly violent action movie following a mercenary swordsman who agrees to fight a group of evil ninjas threatening the shogunate. However, the Eight Devils of Kimon are no ordinary ninjas, as they all have deadly supernatural powers. Ninja Scroll is decidedly not for kids. The gratuitous dismemberment is only the start of the R-rated stuff in Ninja Scroll but if you're of age, it's a blast.
24. Mad God
Year: 2021
Director: Phil Tippett
Phil Tippett, the legendary animator who helped make classics like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and RoboCop, spent 30 years making a stop-motion movie all by himself. To say the result, Mad God, which was released in 2021, is a singular work of art is an understatement. A horrifying and yet at times grotesquely beautiful odyssey into a nightmare realm, Mad God is a feat of craftsmanship. The plot of the dialog-free film, which follows a nameless assassin as he descends into a realm of madness, is as disturbing as it is open to interpretation, but it's impossible to watch Mad God and not be impressed. Disgusted, maybe, but impressed, too.
23. Waltz With Bashir
Year: 2008
Director: Ari Folman
This animated war documentary follows director Ari Folman as he attempts to uncover why he has no memories of his time serving in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1982 Lebanon War. A complex and nuanced exploration of the damage that war does—on both sides of the conflict and psychologically as well as physically—Waltz With Bashir was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. It was not nominated for Best Animated Feature, and a rules technicality prevented it from being eligible for Best Documentary Feature. Another animated documentary, Flee, released 13 years later, would be the first movie to be nominated in all three categories.
22. The House
Year: 2022
Directors: Emma de Swaef, Marc James Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, and Paloma Baeza
This stop-motion anthology collects three unsettling tales, each connected only by the titular house in which they're all set. The first follows a poor girl whose family gets an offer to have a grand house built for them. It seems too good to be true—and it is. The second is about an anthropomorphic rat who is trying to sell the house, though he has a unique pest problem. The final focuses on an anthropomorphic cat trying to maintain the house in a flooded post-apocalyptic sea. It's like a Wes Anderson adaptation of a Junji Ito comic.
21. Plague Dogs
Year: 1982
Director: Martin Rosen
If Watership Down, a Martin Rosen-directed adaptation of a Richard Adams novel, was perhaps a little too intense for most kiddie viewers, their second collaboration, Plague Dogs, is even more so. The film follows two dogs who escape from a research laboratory in England where they had been subjected to cruel experiments. Now on the run, the pair of pooches must try to survive while also escaping the authorities who are following them, trying to kill the dogs, because it's believed they're infected with disease.
20. When the Wind Blows
Year: 1986
Director: Jimmy T. Murakami
One of the most profoundly upsetting and depressing animated films ever made, this 1986 British cartoon follows Jim and Helga Bloggs, an elderly couple living in the British countryside. When nuclear war between the West and the Soviet Union breaks out, the pair think that their stiff upper lips and the tactics that got the British populace through World War II will help them last until normalcy returns, though it becomes horribly clear that they do not understand how weapons and warfare have changed, nor the gravity of the situation. The rest of the movie follows them as they succumb to radiation poisoning and starvation. It's bleak but undeniably effective.
19. Flee
Year: 2021
Director: Jonas Poher Rasmussen
The first movie to get nominations in the Best Animated, Foreign Language, and Documentary Feature categories at the Oscars (though it didn't win in any), Flee is an emotional and at times harrowing personal story. A man, who uses an alias, recounts how he fled from Afghanistan to Denmark as a refugee; a traumatic experience further complicated by various secrets about his identity that he felt he had to keep. It's a tender film that quickly makes a case for why it's animated rather than live-action—the reasons for the medium go beyond just obscuring the storyteller's real identity.
18. My Life as a Zucchini
Year: 2016
Director: Claude Barras
This French-language Swiss film is not nearly as whimsical as its title might suggest, though there is undeniable charm in the stop-motion animation style that helps enhance an at-times potentially devastating drama. Icare,who prefers to go by his nickname of Zucchini, is a young child who finds himself in foster care after the death of his abusive mother. It's ultimately a moving story about regaining trust and finding the love and acceptance of family, and My Life as a Zucchini enjoyed nearly universal acclaim.
17. Fantastic Planet
Year: 1973
Director: René Laloux
Though often overlooked in comparison to the United States or Japan, France has a rich and comparable animation tradition of its own. One of the most acclaimed French animated films is Fantastic Planet, a surrealist sci-fi film from the '70s about a world where giant blue aliens named Draags have brought a human population that they treat as pets at best and a pest in need of extermination at worst. A trippy allegory for racism and animal rights, Fantastic Planet is very much of its time and very much still worth watching today.
16. Persepolis
Year: 2007
Directors: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud
Marjane Satrapi co-directed this adaptation of her autobiographical graphic novel of the same name, released earlier in the 21st century, which recounts her experiences coming of age during the Iranian Revolution. It's a classic tale of teenage rebellion, but things like (relatively) provocative dress and heavy metal music are even higher-stakes interests in a country controlled by Islamic fundamentalists. It's a great movieand one that teenagers could (and should) watch alongside adults. The littlest kids might want to sit Persepolis out, though.
15. Paprika
Year: 2006
Director: Satoshi Kon
Anime great Satoshi Kon's final film before he died too young of cancer, Paprika, is a mind-blowing, visually stunning dream of a movie. Dr. Atsuko Chiba is part of a research team using a new invention that allows people to explore dreams, and she moonlights as a dream therapist using her outgoing alter-ego persona, Paprika. However, the lines between dreams and reality soon begin to blur when a mysterious terrorist starts misusing the machine. It's a dazzling, innovative film,and Christopher Nolan is sometimes accused of ripping off aspects of Paprika for his film Inception, though such claims of plagiarism have never been proven.
14. Vampire Hunter D
Year: 1985
Director: Toyoo Ashida
Just as Vampire Hunter D's titular character is a blend of human and vampire, this cult classic '80s anime is a blend of a shocking number of genres, including horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and plenty of violent action. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where all sorts of Gothic monsters now inhabit the wasteland, the movie follows D, a vampire hunter, who has been hired by a small town woman to kill the vampire that bit her before she turns. Bizarre, gory, and glorious, Vampire Hunter D is an anime classic, as is the 2000 sequel, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.
13. Ghost in the Shell
Year: 1995
Director: Mamoru Oshii
One of the most iconic works of cyberpunk ever made, Ghost in the Shell is a 1995 anime set in a near-future where cybernetic body modifications have become commonplace. The protagonist, Major Motoko Kusanagi, is a human consciousness inside a lifelike but fully artificial body. Her alliancesand identityare tested when a hacker known as "the Puppet Master" starts terrorising New Port City. Thought-provoking and mature, Ghost in the Shell's influence on later films like The Matrix is obvious, and its importance in the sci-fi canon cannot be overstated.
12. South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut
Year: 1999
Director: Trey Parker
South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone took their famously (or infamously, depending on how much pearl-clutching you're doing) foul-mouthed cartoon and put it on the big screen. The result was exactly as profane and boundary-pushing as you'd expect, but it was also… a legitimately great musical. The plot follows Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny as they get involved in a censorship dispute that escalates to all-out war between the United States and Canada, a conflict that Satan and his lover Saddam Husseinaim to take advantage of.
11. Barefoot Gen
Year: 1983
Director: Mori Masaki
The animation style in Barefoot Gen, which tells a story of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima from a child's perspective, matches that of the manga of the same name that Keiji Nakazawa illustrated in the '70s and early '80s. This means that the anime movie looks a little more dated and cartoony than some of the more streamlined anime styles modern viewers are probably familiar with. However, Barefoot Gen's artstyle only makes the horrors of the atomic bomb that much more terrible to behold; an awful contrast between the little animated bodies and the reality of what the blast is doing to them.
10. Tokyo Godfathers
Year: 2003
Director: Satoshi Kon
Tokyo Godfathers deserves to be a Christmas classic, the sort that people watch every holiday season. Set on Christmas Eve, the Satoshi Kon-directed film follows three unhoused people on the streets of Tokyo—a deadbeat, a teenage runaway, and a trans woman—after they find a seemingly abandoned baby. What follows is a miraculous and madcap adventure as they try to get the child back home. Compared to Kon's other films, Tokyo Godfathers is probably the most kid-friendly, though there are decidedly some mature themes and content in it.
9. World of Tomorrow
Years: 2015, 2017, 2020
Director: Don Hertzfeldt
Auteur indie animator Don Hertzfeldt's trio of linked short films is an ambitious, profound exploration of the idea of one's self, using clones, memories, a strange futuristic world, time travel, and stick figures to achieve something miraculous. Hilarious in an offbeat way, punctuated by devastating emotional gut-punches, the first film follows a distant cloned descendant as she travels back and meets her original self more than 200 years earlier, when she was a young girl. The second and third films go from there.
8. The Summit of the Gods
Year: 2021
Director: Patrick Imbert
This French film—which is in French and feels very French despite being based on a '90s manga of the same name—is a jaw-dropping adventure. It follows a reporter who learns of a mountain climber who may have found a camera belonging to George Mallory that might be able to prove if the mountaineer made it to the peak during his ill-fated 1924 expedition to Everest. He tracks down this mysterious climber, learning about his complex backstory and eventually joining him on a trek to the top of the world's highest mountain. Thrilling and gorgeous, The Summit of the Gods is one of the best sports movies ever made and so much more than that.
7. The Wind Rises
Year: 2013
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
A rare Hayao Miyazaki film with no supernatural elements whatsoever, The Wind Rises is a fictionalized biopic about Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, which was responsible for so much death and terror during World War II. Jiro wants only to create beautiful flying machines, and yet his inventions are inevitably used as tools of war. Miyazaki—who himself is famously anti-war and a huge airplane enthusiast—explores this contrast in one of his heaviest and most mature movies.
6. Wolf Children
Year: 2012
Director: Mamoru Hosoda
A beautiful and tear-jerking movie about parenting, Wolf Children follows Hana, a young woman who falls in love with a werewolf. This is much more than a furry romance, though, because after he suddenly dies, Hana is left raising their two young children,who are also werewolves, by herself. She moves to the country to keep them safe (and keep their lupine secret hidden), and raising them is as rewarding as it is challenging. Any viewers who are parents will find plenty to relate to in Wolf Children.
5. Perfect Blue
Year: 1997
Director: Satoshi Kon
An astoundingly piece of fiction, Satoshi Kon's first and best anime movie explores the effects of fame and the then-nascent World Wide Web on one's mental health and sense of self. Mima Kirigoe is a pop idol who decides to leave music and try to make a career as an actor, though some of her fans don't seem to approve. As she's seemingly pursued by a stalker, she starts to lose her grip on reality. It's a chilling work of psychological horror. It's also quite influential; similarities between Perfect Blue and Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan are obvious.
4. Akira
Year: 1988
Director: Katsuhiro Otomo
One of the greatest and most acclaimed anime films ever made, Akira is a cyberpunk masterpiece boasting some unbelievably hand-drawn animation. Set in Neo-Tokyo, which was rebuilt after the original was destroyed, Akira follows Shōtarō Kaneda, the rebellious leader of a biker gang, and his childhood best friend Tetsuo Shima, a hanger-on who gets strange telekinetic powers in a freak accident that leads to a vast conspiracy, body horror, and a fateful confrontation.
3. Princess Mononoke
Year: 1997
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
You could make a reasonable case that Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki's fantasy epic, is the legendary anime director's best film. It's certainly among his most mature. While a teenager could enjoy Princess Mononoke, littler kids who love My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo might be shocked by the war and fairly graphic violence. It's in service of a powerful, beautiful tale, though, following a banished prince as he finds himself in the middle of a struggle between a human society and the ancient spirits of the forest they're encroaching on—and San, a young woman who was raised by the wolf god, fighting with the beasts.
2. It's Such a Beautiful Day
Year: 2012
Director: Don Hertzfeldt
Originally released as a series of short films in 2006, 2008, and 2011 before being collected into one film sharing the title of the final shot, Don Hertzfeldt's one-man exploration of memory and mortality is one of the most profound works of art you'll ever see. Bill, a stick figure identifiable by his little hat, is having memory issues, and as Hertzfeldt narrates his days while his condition worsens, moments of devastating wisdom pierce through the absurdist humor. A younger viewer might laugh at some of the sillier, "random" gags. Adults will be bowled over by the surprising weight of It's Such a Beautiful Day's take on life and death.
1. Grave of the Fireflies
Year: 1988
Director: Isao Takahata
Grave of the Fireflies was infamously first released as part of a double-feature with another Studio Ghibli film, Hayao Miyazaki's light-hearted My Neighbor Totoro. That later movie is perhaps the perfect kids film. However, Grave of the Fireflies is an incredibly heavy, tragic, and upsetting anti-war film that little audiences should stay away from. It's a hard but necessary watch for grownups, though, following siblings Seita and Setsuko after they're made orphans by firebombing near the end of World War II. The two attempt to survive, eventually starving to death. It's hard to imagine a more devastating masterpiece.
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