Animation is not a genre. It is a technique — a way of making images move. The idea that moving drawings are inherently for children is a parochial Western prejudice that Japanese, French, and increasingly global cinema has been dismantling for decades. The films on this list use animation precisely because the technique allows them to do things live action cannot: literalise internal states, create worlds outside physical possibility, move between registers with an ease that the camera can’t match. These are ten animated films that demand adult attention.
- Wolfwalkers (2020)
Cartoon Saloon’s third film in their Irish folklore trilogy is perhaps the most visually extraordinary hand-drawn animated film made this century. Its interlocking visual languages — rigid, grid-like English colonial style versus the flowing, golden wildness of the Irish wolves — is a formal argument made in images. It’s also deeply emotional, as the best children’s films invariably are — but it’s children’s cinema for adults.
- I Lost My Body (2019)
Jérémy Clapin’s French animated film about a severed hand making its way across Paris to find its owner is one of the most inventive film premises of recent years. What it develops into is an extraordinarily affecting meditation on loss, purpose, and whether the past determines the future. It won the César for Best Animated Film and deserves every accolade.
- Persepolis (2007, enduring classic)
Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s adaptation of Satrapi’s graphic memoir about growing up in revolutionary Iran remains the gold standard for autobiographical animation. Its expressionist black and white imagery is inseparable from its argument — that a life lived under political extremism is itself a visual distortion.
- Flee (2021)
Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s documentary animated film follows Amin Nawabi recounting his experience as an Afghan refugee — a story he has never told in full before. Animation allows Amin to tell his story while protecting his identity, but it also allows the film to create images of memory and fear that documentary footage couldn’t capture. It was nominated for Oscar Best Documentary, Best Animated Feature, and Best International Film simultaneously.
- Waltz with Bashir (2008, enduring classic)
Ari Folman’s animated documentary about his own blocked memories of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre remains one of the most formally radical films about war and memory. The animation isn’t a softening device — it’s precisely the right tool for depicting the way traumatic memory distorts and protects itself.
- The Breadwinner (2017)
Nora Twomey’s film about an Afghan girl who disguises herself as a boy to support her family under Taliban rule uses an animated framing-story technique — stories told within the story — to illuminate something about how narrative functions as survival. Heartbreaking and visually beautiful.
- My Happy Family (2017)
Georgian director Nana Ekvtimishvili’s film is technically live action, but its themes — a middle-aged woman breaking free of her family’s suffocating expectations — recur so often in animation discourse that it bears mention as part of the conversation about what stories get told and how. The adjacent animated work coming from Georgia and Eastern Europe deserves more attention.
- Belladonna of Sadness (1973, rediscovered)
Eiichi Yamamoto’s psychedelic Japanese animated film — about a medieval woman who makes a pact with the devil after experiencing violence — is regularly rediscovered by new generations. Its Klimt-influenced imagery and frank depictions of sexuality and power represent animation at its most genuinely transgressive.
- Undone (2019, series)
Amazon’s rotoscoped animated series — technically television but too good to leave off this list — uses the visual language of magic realism to depict a woman’s experience of either time travel or psychotic break. The uncertainty is the point, and the rotoscope technique creates a perpetual sense of unreality that supports it perfectly.
- The House (2022)
A Netflix anthology of three dark animated tales connected by a single house and made in stop-motion by different directors is one of the most formally interesting animated projects in years. Each segment uses different visual aesthetics to different tonal effect, and collectively they argue for adult animation’s capacity for genuine menace and ambiguity.
Animation is capable of anything. The question is not what the medium can do, but what filmmakers are willing to attempt with it. The answer, increasingly, is: everything.
