Animation worth watching as an adult

PB

Perfect Blue

Satoshi Kon, 1997

An idol leaves her group and loses the boundary between performance and self, edited so the audience loses it too. Its influence on live-action thrillers is enormous.

A

Akira

Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988

Drew every frame by hand at a level of detail that effectively ended an era, and the politics underneath are more relevant than the psychic powers.

YN

Your Name

Makoto Shinkai, 2016

A body-swap romance that turns into something with much higher stakes halfway through, and the turn is earned rather than sprung. The light in it is the real achievement.

MA

Millennium Actress

Satoshi Kon, 2001

A life told through the films she was in, with the cuts between eras happening mid-shot. The best editing in any animated film.

TT

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya

Isao Takahata, 2013

Drawn to look like unfinished charcoal sketches, which turns out to be the right register for a folk tale about not wanting to grow up. Furious underneath.

MN

My Neighbour Totoro

Hayao Miyazaki, 1988

Almost no conflict and it holds for ninety minutes, which is far harder than it looks. Children love it and adults notice the mother in the hospital.

SM

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Persichetti, Ramsey, Rothman, 2018

Animates on twos with the line work visible, deliberately refusing photorealism after two decades of everyone chasing it. The most influential animation of its decade.

GI

Ghost in the Shell

Mamoru Oshii, 1995

Slow, cold and mostly quiet, with an action sequence in the middle that everyone remembers and a philosophical argument that everything since has borrowed.

WC

Wolf Children

Mamoru Hosoda, 2012

A single mother raising two children who keep turning into wolves, treated as a parenting story rather than a fantasy. The most grounded film on this list.

OY

Only Yesterday

Isao Takahata, 1991

A woman in her late twenties revisits her ten-year-old self on a trip to the countryside. Nothing dramatic happens, and the ending is quietly devastating.

WO

Whisper of the Heart

Yoshifumi Kondō, 1995

Two teenagers and a decision about whether to be ordinary, which is a bigger subject than most films of any kind attempt. The most underrated Ghibli film.

P

Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud, 2007

A girl growing up through revolution and exile, drawn in flat black and white so the history stays legible rather than overwhelming. Funny in places you would not expect.

WW

Waltz with Bashir

Ari Folman, 2008

A documentary about a memory that will not come back, animated because the film cannot show what it did not see. The switch to live footage at the end is the whole argument.

TT

The Triplets of Belleville

Sylvain Chomet, 2003

Almost no dialogue, a Tour de France that is really a kidnapping, and character design that would be grotesque if it were not so affectionate.

FM

Fantastic Mr Fox

Wes Anderson, 2009

Stop-motion photographed so the fur moves, with Anderson’s framing applied to a children’s book and the cruelty kept in. Better than the book and the book is good.

TI

The Illusionist

Sylvain Chomet, 2010

An ageing magician and a girl who believes the magic is real, from an unfilmed Tati script. Quiet, and the sadness arrives without any announcement.

MG

Mind Game

Masaaki Yuasa, 2004

Changes visual style every few minutes because the character’s life is being reimagined, and it never becomes a gimmick. The most alive film on this list.