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The 50 Best Animated Movies for Adults

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Ignacio Weil

TV Shows & Movies - October 9th 2026, 20:30 GMT+2

About this list

Talking animals and hand-drawn faces offer no guarantee of a gentle evening: these animated movies tackle everything from sex and graphic violence to war, grief, and identity. Spanning decades of adult animation, the selection includes cult oddities, anime classics, and intimate dramas with plenty on their minds. Got a favorite we missed? Make its case in the comments. | © Kadokawa Daiei Studio

1. Fritz the Cat (1972)

Fritz has plenty to say about liberation, especially when it might help him get laid. Ralph Bakshi’s adaptation of Robert Crumb’s underground comics follows this spectacularly self-serving cat through sex, drugs, and revolutionary posturing. The first animated feature to receive an X rating in America is abrasive viewing, but its nastiest jokes often target people who mistake talking politics for having principles. | © Steve Krantz Productions

2. Animal Farm (1954)

The pigs don’t need to look frightening to become tyrants; they just need everyone else to keep working. Halas and Batchelor’s adaptation of George Orwell turns cheerful revolutionary promises into a bitter lesson in exploitation. Watch how the commandments change while the animals struggle to remember what they originally said. The political horror happens in the bookkeeping. | © Halas and Batchelor

3. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)

Watercolor paintings stretch across the screen as Jeanne’s persecution becomes a furious, sexually explicit nightmare. After a feudal lord assaults her, a pact with the devil offers power that her community would never willingly grant. Eiichi Yamamoto lets delicate illustrations erupt into psychedelic movement, creating a disturbing tension between the beauty of the artwork and the brutality of the story. | © Mushi Production

4. Fantastic Planet (1973)

Being somebody’s pet looks considerably less charming from the pet’s perspective. On a planet ruled by enormous blue Draags, tiny humans are domesticated, persecuted, and casually exterminated. René Laloux’s science-fiction fable makes education a survival tool, while Roland Topor’s designs supply a wonderfully hostile ecosystem. Even the background wildlife seems capable of ruining your afternoon in ways nobody has named yet. | © Les Films Armorial

5. Watership Down (1978)

Hazel’s rabbits need somewhere safe to live, which turns out to be a fairly ambitious request. Their search leads through traps, predators, and communities with deeply unpleasant ideas about obedience. *Watership Down* gives its animals their own mythology and political problems without losing their vulnerability as prey. A peaceful stretch of countryside has rarely contained so many excellent reasons to panic. | © Nepenthe Productions

6. Wizards (1977)

The secret weapon in this battle between wizard brothers is a projector loaded with Nazi propaganda. That collision of fairy-tale creatures and historical footage gives Ralph Bakshi’s *Wizards* its peculiar menace. Blackwolf understands that an army needs images to believe in as much as weapons to fire, while his brother Avatar approaches saving the world with considerably less military discipline. | © Bakshi Productions

7. The Plague Dogs (1982)

Freedom arrives without instructions for Rowf and Snitter, two laboratory dogs who escape into the Lake District. Hunger and pursuit quickly complicate their relief, while Snitter’s damaged perception makes the landscape even harder to navigate. Martin Rosen keeps their confusion painfully believable: they can talk to each other, but they cannot understand the human decisions that have made their lives unbearable. | © Nepenthe Productions

8. Heavy Metal (1981)

A glowing green orb connects stories involving a futuristic cabbie, a warrior woman, and space travelers with extremely questionable habits. *Heavy Metal* cheerfully treats science fiction as an excuse for lust, violence, and extravagant illustration. Its anthology structure keeps changing the visual rules, while the soundtrack makes even the sleazier detours feel like something worth turning the speakers up for. | © Potterton Productions

9. When the Wind Blows (1986)

Jim and Hilda believe a government leaflet and a little household preparation will see them through a nuclear attack. Their faith would be funny if it weren’t so devastating. Adapted from Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel, *When the Wind Blows* follows familiar marital routines into catastrophe, with John Mills and Peggy Ashcroft making every reassuring exchange sound more helpless than the last. | © Meltdown Productions / TVC London

Hadashi no Gen — 10. Barefoot Gen (1983)

Keiji Nakazawa drew on his own survival of Hiroshima for the manga behind *Barefoot Gen*, and that personal connection gives the film its urgency. Gen’s cheekiness and family squabbles establish a life before the atomic bomb destroys it. The blast sequence is horrifying, but the struggle to find food and protect the surviving family keeps the devastation from becoming an isolated spectacle. | © Madhouse / Gen Production

11. Akira (1988)

Tetsuo finally gets enough power to stop feeling inferior to Kaneda, and Neo-Tokyo pays for it. Beneath the biker chases and spectacular destruction, Katsuhiro Otomo’s *Akira* builds its disaster around an ugly, recognizable friendship dynamic. The astonishing city animation gives that resentment room to explode, while the body horror makes gaining control over everything look suspiciously like losing control of yourself. | © Tokyo Movie Shinsha / Akira Committee

12. Alice (1988)

The White Rabbit pulls himself free of a display case, sheds sawdust, and immediately establishes that this Wonderland has hygiene issues. Jan Švankmajer combines a live-action Alice with stop-motion creatures assembled from unsettling everyday objects. Scraping sounds, snapping teeth, and repeated close-ups of speaking lips give Lewis Carroll’s adventure a physical unpleasantness that glossy fantasy adaptations tend to politely remove. | © Condor Films / Channel Four Films

13. Felidae (1994)

Francis moves into a new neighborhood and immediately acquires a murder investigation. The bodies are cats, the suspects are cats, and the crimes are considerably nastier than that setup suggests. *Felidae* borrows the curiosity and sardonic attitude of a private-eye thriller, then follows its clues into experimentation and fanaticism. The nightmare sequences alone should permanently discourage anyone from calling it cute. | © TFC Trickompany Filmproduktion

14. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

A tin of fruit drops becomes an almost unbearable object in Isao Takahata’s wartime drama. Seita tries to care for his little sister Setsuko after their home and family life collapse, making decisions no child should have to make. *Grave of the Fireflies* preserves their playfulness alongside their hunger, allowing small pleasures to matter even when the audience knows how precarious they are. | © Studio Ghibli / Shinchosha

15. Perfect Blue (1997)

Mima leaves her pop group to become an actress, but her audience has other ideas about who she is allowed to be. Satoshi Kon turns that possessiveness into a thriller where television scenes, private memories, and imagined encounters bleed together. *Perfect Blue* is especially vicious about the expectation that a woman’s public image should remain available for everyone else to control. | © Madhouse

16. Ghost in the Shell (1995)

If your memories can be rewritten, how much of your identity can you actually trust? Major Motoko Kusanagi’s pursuit of the Puppet Master gives that question a police-thriller framework. Mamoru Oshii also leaves room for long, absorbing passages through the city, where artificial bodies and crowded streets make the boundary between a person and a manufactured thing increasingly difficult to locate. | © Production I.G

Vampire hunter D Bloodlust — 17. Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)

Hired to retrieve a woman from a vampire, D discovers that the supposed rescue is tangled up in a forbidden romance. Rival hunters make the assignment messier still. Yoshiaki Kawajiri fills *Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust* with elaborate gothic architecture and deadly creatures, but the strongest thread is its sympathy for outsiders who would quite reasonably prefer everyone to leave them alone. | © Madhouse

Jin Roh — 18. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1999)

Behind the red goggles and heavy armor is a man who hesitates when ordered to kill. That hesitation puts Kazuki Fuse inside a web of political maneuvering in an alternate-history Japan. *Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade* folds the story of Little Red Riding Hood into its uneasy romance, steadily questioning whether someone trained to behave like a wolf can choose anything else. | © Production I.G / Bandai Visual

Dead leaves — 19. Dead Leaves (2004)

Retro has a television for a head, Pandy has a distinctive eye marking, and neither has much interest in behaving responsibly. Their crime spree lands them in a lunar prison, where the film discovers even more offensive ways to accelerate. Hiroyuki Imaishi’s *Dead Leaves* packs its short running time with graphic distortions and outrageous bodily humor. Subtlety apparently missed the transport. | © Production I.G

20. Walking Life (2001)

Conversations about free will become harder to dismiss when the room itself won’t stop wobbling. Richard Linklater uses rotoscoped live-action footage to follow a young man through encounters that may belong to an extended dream. *Waking Life* invites disagreement with its talkative philosophers; the shifting animation supplies the uncertainty, ensuring that even the most confident speaker never occupies entirely solid ground. | © Detour Filmproduction / IFC Productions

21. A Scanner Darkly (2006)

Undercover officer Bob Arctor ends up participating in surveillance of his own life while addiction erodes his ability to understand it. Richard Linklater’s Philip K. Dick adaptation finds bleak comedy in rambling conversations, suspicious housemates, and technology designed to conceal identity. The rotoscoped faces never quite settle, giving the viewer a small, persistent taste of Arctor’s inability to trust what he sees. | © Thousand Words

Paprika 2007 — 22. Paprika (2006)

A device that lets therapists enter dreams becomes a spectacular security problem when it is stolen. Satoshi Kon takes full advantage: identities shift, locations fold into one another, and a parade of impossible objects threatens waking reality. Amid the visual overload, *Paprika* also finds room for a detective’s unfinished emotional business, making cinema itself part of the dream he needs to understand. | © Madhouse

23. Persepolis (2007)

Buying forbidden music and arguing with adults give Marjane a teenage life that remains recognizable through revolution, war, and exile. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud preserve the humor of her autobiographical comics without making the danger feel distant. *Persepolis* is particularly sharp about belonging: leaving an oppressive home can be necessary, yet arriving somewhere freer doesn’t automatically make you feel understood. | © 2.4.7. Films

24. Blood Tea and Red Strings (2006)

An argument over a handmade doll sends mice and woodland creatures into an increasingly strange struggle over possession. Christiane Cegavske spent thirteen years creating this dialogue-free stop-motion fairy tale, and its textures reward close attention. Fabric, fur, and tiny domestic objects acquire an eerie importance; the creatures’ devotion to something they have made becomes as unsettling as anything lurking outside. | © Christiane Cegavske Productions

25. Idiots and Angels (2008)

Growing wings is deeply inconvenient when you would rather continue being a miserable bastard. Bill Plympton’s dialogue-free black comedy gives its unpleasant protagonist an unwanted physical push toward decency, then surrounds him with people eager to profit from it. The elastic, scratchy drawings make bodies wonderfully unreliable. Even a potential miracle can be cut down to size by ordinary human greed. | © Plymptoons

26. The Sky Crawlers (2008)

Spectacular aerial combat is the job; an eerily repetitive life on the ground is the cost. Mamoru Oshii follows young pilots who remain adolescents while fighting a corporate-managed war staged for public consumption. In *The Sky Crawlers*, meals, cigarettes, and awkward conversations gradually become more troubling than the dogfights. Surviving another mission offers very little reassurance when the future barely exists. | © Production I.G

27. Redline (2009)

JP enters an interplanetary race with a towering hairstyle and a car that looks nowhere near sensible enough for the competition. Sensible would spoil the fun. Takeshi Koike’s *Redline* spent seven years in production, and its hand-drawn speed, exaggerated machinery, and violently stretching perspectives justify the obsession. The romance and race fixing provide stakes, but acceleration is the film’s most persuasive language. | © Madhouse

28. Waltz With Bashir (2008)

A friend’s recurring nightmare sends filmmaker Ari Folman searching for missing memories of his military service in Lebanon. Interviews become animated recollections, allowing uncertainty and impossible imagery to exist beside testimony. *Waltz with Bashir* questions the mind’s capacity to protect itself from its own past, before its final move into actual footage makes that protective distance impossible to maintain. | © Bridgit Folman Film Gang

29. Afro Samurai: Resurrection (2009)

Stealing Afro’s headband and his father’s remains is an efficient way to end his retirement. Samuel L. Jackson returns as both the swordsman and Ninja Ninja, with Lucy Liu supplying a formidable new adversary. *Afro Samurai: Resurrection* pairs RZA’s music with lavishly bloody combat, while its revenge plot keeps producing fresh grievances for the next person willing to pick up a blade. | © GONZO

Metropía — 30. Metropia (2009)

Roger hears a voice in his head whenever he uses the enormous subway network beneath Europe. Unfortunately, his suspicion that something is controlling him has a basis in reality. Tarik Saleh’s *Metropia* uses manipulated photographic imagery to make its people look uncomfortably constrained, as though the environment has already won. It’s a conspiracy thriller where simply commuting becomes an act of surrender. | © Atmo / Zentropa Entertainments

Its Such a Beautiful Day — 31. It's Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

Bill’s little hat and stick-figure body provide almost no preparation for how much his deteriorating health will hurt. Don Hertzfeldt combines deadpan narration, fragmented images, and startling photographic effects as ordinary routines become difficult to comprehend. *It’s Such a Beautiful Day* notices the ridiculous details that occupy a person’s mind, then makes the ability to notice anything at all feel precious. | © Bitter Films

Chico Rita — 32. Chico & Rita (2010)

The attraction between pianist Chico and singer Rita is immediate; keeping their lives in tune proves considerably harder. Their romance moves between Havana and the international music scene, buffeted by ambition, jealousy, and racism. With Bebo Valdés’s music and Javier Mariscal’s expressive designs, *Chico & Rita* makes performing together feel intimate enough that every professional opportunity also carries an emotional risk. | © Fernando Trueba Producciones / Estudio Mariscal

Psiconautas — 33. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (2015)

Dinky wants to escape a ruined island; Birdboy can barely escape the forces tormenting him. Their animal designs suggest vulnerability, which makes the surrounding addiction, exploitation, and environmental damage harder to shrug off. Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero give this bleak adventure flashes of grotesque humor, while protecting a small possibility that the children might inherit something beyond the adults’ wreckage. | © ZircoZine / Basque Films

34. The Congress (2013)

Robin Wright plays an actress named Robin Wright whose studio would prefer owning her digital likeness to dealing with her actual presence. That sour business proposition opens into an animated world where appearances become available for consumption. Ari Folman’s *The Congress* takes a deliberately disorienting route through celebrity and escape, anchored by a mother’s increasingly desperate desire to reach her son. | © Bridgit Folman Film Gang / Pandora Filmproduktion

35. Tower (2016)

An exposed stretch of pavement becomes an impossible distance when a sniper is firing from above. Keith Maitland reconstructs the University of Texas tower shooting through survivors’ and witnesses’ experiences, combining rotoscoped performances with interviews and archival material. *Tower* pays close attention to the people who chose to help, allowing acts of courage to emerge from confusion rather than retrospective heroic certainty. | © Go-Valley

36. Anomalisa (2015)

Almost everybody Michael Stone meets has the same voice, supplied by Tom Noonan. Then Lisa speaks, and an ordinary business trip becomes charged with possibility. Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson use that deceptively simple device to explore Michael’s loneliness and selfishness. The stop-motion intimacy is painfully awkward, especially as his hunger for someone exceptional starts revealing how little he sees other people. | © Starburns Industries

37. Loving Vincent (2017)

Delivering a letter draws Armand Roulin into contradictory accounts of Vincent van Gogh’s final days. Around that investigation, the artist’s paintings become moving environments, created through thousands of hand-painted oil frames. *Loving Vincent* makes looking an active pleasure: a familiar face or room acquires another meaning when it starts speaking, while conflicting recollections resist reducing the man to his most recognizable images. | © BreakThru Films / Trademark Films

38. In This Corner of the World (2016)

Suzu has a talent for drawing and an increasingly difficult household to feed in wartime Kure. Following her shopping, cooking, and relationships gives *In This Corner of the World* an unusually intimate understanding of civilian endurance. Sunao Katabuchi allows humor and absent-mindedness to survive alongside deprivation, so the losses feel like intrusions into an actual life rather than scenes arranged for tragedy. | © MAPPA / GENCO

39. Ruben Brandt, Collector (2018)

A psychotherapist recruits his criminal patients to steal the paintings tormenting him in his dreams. As treatment plans go, it creates an impressive international policing problem. Milorad Krstić builds *Ruben Brandt, Collector* around thirteen artworks, filling the surrounding world with distorted anatomy and visual references. The pleasure comes from watching an elegant heist film behave as unpredictably as the mind behind it. | © Ruben Brandt LLC

40. Violence Voyager (2018)

Two boys discover an amusement park that should have prompted an immediate retreat. Instead, they enter a grotesque adventure involving experiments and bodily transformation. Ujicha’s “gekimation” technique uses illustrated cutouts manipulated in physical settings, giving *Violence Voyager* an unnerving handmade quality. The visible artificiality offers surprisingly little comfort when the fluids start flowing and the children realize what the attraction actually does. | © A-toys / KATSU-do

41. I Lost My Body (2019)

Crossing a city becomes a demanding survival mission when you are a severed hand. Jérémy Clapin gives that extraordinary journey weight and tactile detail, then intertwines it with the life of Naoufel, the young man it belongs to. *I Lost My Body* makes touch central to both stories, connecting physical separation with the much less visible difficulty of reaching another person. | © Xilam Animation

La Casa Lobo — 42. The Wolf House (2018)

María escapes a religious colony and finds shelter in a house where walls, furniture, and bodies refuse to remain stable. Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña let paintings become sculptures and figures dissolve into their surroundings. Inspired by Colonia Dignidad, *The Wolf House* uses that constant transformation to make safety feel provisional: escaping the compound does not mean escaping the stories it taught you. | © Diluvio / Globo Rojo Films

43. The Spine of the Night (2021)

A sacred plant offers knowledge powerful enough to become everybody’s problem. Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King follow its consequences across generations, using hand-rotoscoped animation for a dark fantasy full of exposed flesh and spectacular violence. *The Spine of Night* gives its sorcery a political ugliness: rulers and would-be saviors keep finding ways to turn enlightenment into another instrument of domination. | © Gorgonaut / Reno Productions

44. Josep (2020)

Drawing gives Josep Bartolí a way to record what the people imprisoning him would rather leave unseen. Aurel’s film follows the Catalan artist into a French internment camp after his flight from Franco’s forces, framing the experience through a guard’s recollections. Its restrained movement and expressive lines keep attention on the act of witnessing, and on an unlikely friendship across barbed wire. | © Les Films d’Ici Méditerranée

45. Flee (2021)

Preparing to marry forces Amin to confront a history he has kept largely hidden from the life he built in Denmark. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary follows his escape from Afghanistan alongside his experiences of sexuality, family, and secrecy. Animation protects his identity while making the recollections accessible, preserving the uncomfortable distance between reaching a safe country and feeling safe yourself. | © Final Cut for Real / Sun Creature Studio

46. Mad God (2021)

A masked figure descends into a world where machinery grinds away and living things appear painfully disposable. Phil Tippett’s long-gestating project offers little explanatory dialogue, trusting its handmade environments to do the damage. *Mad God* rewards attention to the smallest disgusting detail, though “rewards” may be an optimistic word for a film so committed to showing what happens beneath the machinery. | © Tippett Studio

The Peasants online2 — 47. The Peasants (2022)

Jagna’s village has plenty of traditions and very little patience for a woman who refuses its expectations. DK and Hugh Welchman adapt Władysław Reymont’s novel through painted animation inspired by Polish art, giving harvests, celebrations, and changing seasons extraordinary richness. The community’s beauty makes its cruelty more disturbing, particularly when desire and property disputes become excuses to punish the most convenient target. | © BreakThru Films / DigitalKraft

Cyprozoo — 48. Cryptozoo (2021)

Protecting mythical creatures sounds admirable until the protection starts resembling a tourist attraction. Dash Shaw and animation director Jane Samborski fill *Cryptozoo* with strange, vividly drawn beings, including a dream-eating baku sought by competing interests. Its psychedelic adventure keeps troubling its own rescue mission: loving something unusual doesn’t necessarily mean you understand it, or that it needs you to build it an enclosure. | © Fit Via Fi

Cropped Mars Express — 49. Mars Express (2023)

Detective Aline Ruby and her android partner Carlos investigate a missing student in a society that has made artificial life ordinary. Jérémie Périn builds the world through working details, from police procedures to the restrictions placed on synthetic bodies. *Mars Express* delivers sharp action and a properly tangled mystery, while Carlos’s complicated existence gives the question of robot autonomy a personal cost. | © Everybody on Deck / Je Suis Bien Content

50. Unicorn Wars (2022)

Boot camp is bad enough without discovering that the adorable recruits are preparing for a religious war against unicorns. Alberto Vázquez centers the carnage on two bear brothers whose troubled relationship feeds the larger conflict. *Unicorn Wars* gets considerable mileage from its pastel brutality, but the deeper horror is the ease with which humiliation and jealousy become useful tools for military indoctrination. | © Uniko / Abano Producións

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An existential crisis looks surprisingly good in hand-drawn animation. So do ugly breakups, political nightmares, and jokes that would get a family movie pulled from theaters. The best animated movies for adults put that freedom to work, whether they’re making you laugh at something appalling or leaving you quietly staring at the credits. Beautiful artwork doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in for a comfortable evening.

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An existential crisis looks surprisingly good in hand-drawn animation. So do ugly breakups, political nightmares, and jokes that would get a family movie pulled from theaters. The best animated movies for adults put that freedom to work, whether they’re making you laugh at something appalling or leaving you quietly staring at the credits. Beautiful artwork doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in for a comfortable evening.