Adult-Themed Animated Movies

Wild Things: 8 Adult-Themed Animated Movies You Need to Seek Out

 

 

Around the time Pixar was making new classics like The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and WALL-E, something awfully annoying started happening. More than a few think pieces started coming out about how the mighty animation house was outpacing most big studios in sheer storytelling prowess. In a way, the writers of these pieces were dead on. WALL-E showed a more nuanced and ironclad understanding of physical comedy than arguably any movie in the aughts. The Incredibles still embarrasses every single movie based on a DC or Marvel property in formal cohesion and emotional resonance. With the exception of Big Night, has any movie about cooking and artistic passion felt so imbued with extensive, hard-won experience as Ratatouille?

Image via Studio Ghibli

The accolades were well deserved, but the fervor stirred up over these movies also touched on a certain, ongoing strain of shallow American exceptionalism. Much like every idiot who says that movies aren’t as good as they used to be is clearly not paying attention to 98% of foreign films, the embrace of Pixar seemed to suggest an ignorance of a long line of underground and foreign animated movies. Pixar’s CEO John Lasseter has an open obsession and affinity for Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, the production house behind My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke, but beyond Miyazaki’s influential work, Ghibli’s output has been relegated to cult status. Clearly, those who saw a revolution in anything but strictly American animation in Pixar had missed Only Yesterday, Grave of the Fireflies, or The Triplets of Belleville, amongst a host of other gems.
Part of the issue is that these movies are bleak, more suited for adults in substance than anxious children. Pixar’s ingenuity was in not condescending to children, to treat the audience as attentive, intelligent, and empathetic. Even today, that’s a big deal. When compared to something as thunderously political and visually astounding as Waltz with Bashir, however, Pixar’s triumphs stopped at the water’s edge, rarely even grazing the sublime and the metaphysical. Their movies remain joyous, rewarding, and often hilarious. Still, one wonders what would happen if they took the plunge and made a movie strictly for adults, or adapted something so seemingly impossible to calibrate in live-action as Geek Love or, until recently, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

Image via Sony

The times are a changing, though. For one, Adult Swim exists. More pointedly, bracingly explicit animated series like Rick and Morty and the unparalleled BoJack Horseman have dedicated, impassioned fan-bases that span all ages, and Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Sausage Party looks to be doing what Pixar never deigned to do, even if it’s tied to a lot of dick jokes and enough curse words to make George Carlin blush. Not surprisingly, this year saw ecstatic audiences packing in for revival theatrical releases for Only Yesterday and the uncanny Belladonna of Sadness. Both of those films appear on the list of the best adult-oriented animated films below, which I took up in honor of Sausage Party’s release later this week. If ever there were a reason to spend some money on Amazon Prime or iTunes, these wild wonders of boundless imagination would fit the criteria nicely.
A quick note: more than a few of these films could be construed as being made with children in mind. They very well might have been. My thinking here is to single out films that reach beyond the simple yet still stunning wonder of the animated image to touch on thematic concerns that only adults can fully appreciate. In other words, your kids might love these movies, but they won’t fully understand the depth of their existential, societal, and political meaning.

'Waltz with Bashir'

Even on this list, Waltz with Bashir stands out. Released in 2008 to wild acclaim, Waltz with Bashir, along with another entry on this list, $9.99, was the first Israeli animated film in over 45 years to secure stateside release or, really, release at all. It’s not surprising that the one place where the film was expressly banned was Lebanon. The film’s writer-director Ari Folman, is a veteran of the Lebanon War, and the film recounts both his memories of those days and his present-day conversations with the men who lived through it with him. Here, the animated form offers a distancing mechanism, a way of conveying the slippery, unreliable nature of memory. There’s a pickled humor to the documentary-like interactions, and the flashbacks are boldly colorful, enthrallingly experiential, and wildly creative. It’s a wonder to behold, but the film hits like a sledgehammer, depicting not just the melancholy of age and fading remembrances but the horrors of war, as much for the dead as for the survivors.

'Grave of the Fireflies'

There are certain movies you just don’t want to talk about. Some, like, say, A Serbian Film, just shouldn’t be discussed in mixed company; other are directed by Michael Haneke and just zap all the hope out of your body. Grave of the Fireflies, though not without its sense of inventive wonder, belongs in the latter camp. Directed by longtime Studio Ghibli heavyweight Isao Takahata, whose own family bore the horrors of the USA’s bombing of Japan in World War II, the film focuses on a young girl and her older brother left orphaned after the hellfire of the first round of bombings. To explain just how they get along in a decimated world, and where they end up, is too much for me to bear right now, frankly, but needless to say, this gorgeous, devastating work sinks down into your stomach like too much of a bad meal. Takahata sees war as true hell, one where even innocent children’s deaths are ignorable for the glory, pride, and idealism of a nation. The director doesn’t ignore Japan’s own hand in the war – it’s right out front, in fact – but blaming one nation is besides the point. Everyone is guilty for what happens to these children, because everyone, even those who protest it, is implicit in the endless pain and unexpected consequences of war.

'Mary & Max'

The stop-motion-animated Mary & Max belongs in the same camp of daunting yet tremendously rewarding works as Grave of the Fireflies. It should come as a surprise, then, that the film is actually about a friendship. Over the years, letters are sent between the young girl who becomes a lonely woman, voiced by Toni Colette, and the severely depressed Jewish city-dweller of the title. The world is not easy on either of them. Domestic and emotional abuse are rampant, everyday horrors visit them and their loved ones often, and their minute hopes are often dashed right at the moment when their luck seems to be changing. The gorgeous use of black, white, and grey in the surroundings and characters underlines a certain overriding pessimism. And that seems to be the point. Where so many films simply ask you to believe in the power of friendship because of a good deed or acting like a human, Mary & Max considers even the faintest connection reason enough to push along in life. That the late, inimitable Philip Seymour Hoffman voices Max with delicate yet robustly humorous panache is at once fitting and something of a cruel joke when all is said and done.

'$9.99'

The work of Israeli writer Etgar Keret is, like Murakami, not easily depicted on the big screen. It’s too wrapped up in symbology and transcendentalism, too nuanced in its attention to history, tradition, and national mythology. And yet, when he paired with writer-director Tatiana Rosenthal on $9.99, something akin to a perfect reflection of his work arose. Keret deals largely in short stories, and $9.99, an Australian-Israeli co-production, plays like a swirl of stories from a parallel universe where physics and reason have gone to cloud cuckoo land. A surly angel, voiced by Geoffrey Rush, strikes up a friendship with an old man; an unemployed, existential twenty-something searches for the meaning of life; a man changes his very genetic make-up to please the woman he falls for; and a heartbroken loner suddenly befriends a bunch of hard-drinking collegiate men who are two-inches tall each. Each storyline has its own good-humored yet barbed details of a life lived under the mystery of existence. The ultimate fascination that drives the film, however, is the odd and oddly optimistic joy that Keret and Rosenthal find in the unlikely ways people find meaning and hope in life, whether its “true” or not.

'Fantastic Mr. Fox'

You could watch Wes Anderson’s stop-motion masterwork 35 times, as I have, and still find a plethora of details strewn throughout the meticulously crafted landscape. On those merits alone, Fantastic Mr. Fox would qualify as the best Roald Dahl adaptation in existence, and yes, I’m counting Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – nostalgia be damned. With George Clooney voicing the titular family-man-cum-charming-thief, the film brings up a classical dichotomy – man’s tendency to be both a civilized member of society and, well, an animal. BoJack Horseman belongs in this company, but it’s not nearly as emotionally resonant. It’s also not nearly as funny, which is saying something. Fox trades the loving embrace and responsibility of his family, voiced by Meryl Streep and Jason Schwartzman, for the accolades from a group of local males, voiced by the likes of Bill Murray, Wallace Wolodarsky, Adrien Brody, and Eric Chase Anderson. This comes to a head when he takes on a pack of mean, manipulative barons of local industry, but its roots are in the balance of art and existence. Fox needs to be a showman but also a loving, calm father and husband, much like art must at once be visually astounding and honest to its core, even when your heroes are foxes, field mice, and badgers.

'South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut'

In hindsight, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut highlighted a major turn in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s art, and yes, I said art. The seasons of South Park that followed the 1999 release of this miraculous comedy were sharper and more merciless in their humor and their politics. The film, which finds the mighty quartet of Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny trying to stop an international incident between America and Canada over curse words, isn’t timely but rather timeless in its unrelenting criticism of censorship. Like all great comedies, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut looks at repression as the ultimate villain of an orderly and free society, and the reason that society grows more debauched with every passing year. For all the force that goes into the complaints, petitions, and moronic “movements” against bad language in rap music or sex in movies, there will inevitably be a push back, if only in total giddy defiance. Parker and Stone seem happy to be the harbingers of that retaliation, and with this movie, they dropped the proverbial hydrogen bomb on conservative America.

'The Haunted World of El Superbeasto'

Known primarily as the patron saint of modern horror, Rob Zombie also took time out of his busy head-banging schedule to direct this wildly perverse, ecstatically entertaining trip through horny hell. The titular character is a luchador-superhero-ladies-man, voiced by Tom Papa, who pairs up with his sister, spy-stripper Suzy X, to take down the nefarious Dr. Satan, voiced with giddy delight by Paul Giamatti, who is involved with everything from Nazi zombies to killer robots. High art, this is not, but in the same defiant spirit as Sausage Party, the film suggests a debauched world that’s just as joyous as the wholesome cartoons that are churned out for the kid-folk, without any guilt, moralizing, or half-cocked philosophical musings to weigh it down.

'A Scanner Darkly'

Philip K. Dick is not easy to adapt. I love Blade Runner and all, but that movie doesn’t really reflect the sardonic, wild perspective of the godfather of modern science fiction. Blade Runner is a great Ridley Scott movie and that’s it. A Scanner Darkly is a great Richard Linklater film – the director has quite a lot of those – and a great Dick adaptation. One could pick at the wondrous, melancholic passages of Dick’s book that were weeded out of the adaptation, but that seems petty in this case. Linklater’s handling of a world where cops can look like anyone and no one, and drugs have become even more rampant and unstable as, is sublimely thoughtful in form and narrative. The rotoscoped animation not only gives the film the colorful vision of a grade-A high but also underlines the struggle with identity that Keanu Reeves’ undercover cop is butting up against. Much like an actor meant to serve as something of a blue-print for digital artists, Reeves’ on-the-brink policeman can’t quite tell if he’s himself or someone else anymore and his struggle is potently conveyed. Linklater goes one step further be showing the group of junkies that Reeves’ characters pals around with, including Rory Cochrane and Robert Downey Jr., are far more entertaining and accepting than the cops in the precinct and the job that’s tied to them. The escape he finds in drugs and acting like someone else is as much a fault of his own weakness as it is the world’s need for order and uniformity.