Animation isn't just for kids. From Spirited Away to Waltz with Bashir to Into the Spider-Verse — the form that's now doing the most-ambitious storytelling in mainstream cinema.
The American assumption that animation is a children's medium is, historically and globally, a minority view. Japanese animation has produced serious adult work since the 1980s. European animation has done the same. Even within American animation, the medium has periodically produced work — Watership Down (1978), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Anomalisa (2015) — aimed unambiguously at an adult audience.
Our picks are animated films that work as adult cinema — not films with 'mature content' so much as films whose narrative ambition, formal complexity, or emotional weight assumes an adult viewer.
Animation removes the photographic constraint. The medium can depict anything imaginable for the cost of drawing it. This is why animated cinema has been used disproportionately for stories that live-action could not have rendered — interior states, memories, dreams, anthropomorphised abstractions, historical events whose footage no longer exists.
It's also why animation has, increasingly, become the preferred medium for documentary subjects too difficult or sensitive to film. Waltz with Bashir's depiction of the Sabra and Shatila massacre would have been almost impossible as live-action. Flee's protagonist could not be filmed without revealing his identity. The animated documentary is one of the genuine formal developments of 21st-century cinema.