Somewhere along the line, animation got stuck with the reputation of being kids' stuff, and it's honestly one of the strangest misunderstandings in movies. Animation is just a medium. It can go anywhere — inside a dying star, inside a memory, inside an eleven-year-old's head. The films below were made with children welcome but adults very much in mind, and I'll warn you now: a few of them will make you cry harder than any live-action drama on this site.
Studio Ghibli: Start Here, Honestly
Spirited Away (2001) is the natural first stop — it won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and it earns it. A sullen ten-year-old named Chihiro stumbles into a bathhouse for spirits and has to work there, hold onto her own name, and grow up fast enough to free her parents. Every frame is hand-drawn and stuffed with invention. But what actually gets me is how small the heroism is: no chosen one, no prophecy, just a scared kid doing the next right thing.
Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke (1997) is his angriest film — a violent, morally tangled epic about industry chewing up the natural world, where the forest gods are magnificent and terrifying and there is no clean villain anywhere. Then there's Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (1988): two siblings trying to survive in wartime Japan, told so quietly it almost sneaks up on you. People call it one of the greatest war films ever made, full stop. Plenty of viewers can only watch it once. I'm one of them.
Pixar's Emotional Heavyweights
Let's talk about the first ten minutes of Up (2009), because everyone else will. An almost wordless montage takes Carl and Ellie from childhood sweethearts to old age and loss — a whole marriage, told better than most films manage in two hours. The flying house is the poster. The grief is the film.
WALL-E (2008) does something nearly as bold: almost forty minutes with barely any dialogue, following a lonely little robot tidying up an abandoned Earth. It's consumerism, environmental collapse, and a first crush, played as silent comedy worthy of Chaplin. Coco (2017) heads into Mexico's Land of the Dead and lands on an idea that flattens audiences of every age — that people truly die only when the living stop remembering them. And Toy Story 3 (2010) closes out Andy's childhood with an incinerator scene and a goodbye that an entire generation felt in their ribs.
Two more. Inside Out (2015) puts five emotions at a control panel inside a young girl's mind and builds its whole climax around a radical thought: sadness isn't a malfunction, it's a necessity. Therapists genuinely recommend this one to families. And Ratatouille (2007) smuggles a manifesto about art into a film about a rat who cooks — its climax isn't a chase, it's a food critic surrendering to a memory. If you've ever made anything and had to defend why it mattered, that scene finds you.
And spare a thought for Soul (2020), Pete Docter's film about a jazz musician who dies on the best day of his life and spends the afterlife trying to get back. It's basically a midlife crisis with a piano score — all about the gap between the dream you're chasing and the ordinary Tuesday afternoons that turn out to be your actual life. It was released straight to streaming during lockdown, which means half the adults who needed to hear it found it at exactly the right moment, on their couch, in the middle of the night.
Beyond the Big Studios
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) — a comic book that actually moves: halftone dots, thought bubbles, clashing art styles, and Miles Morales learning that anyone can wear the mask. It reset what mainstream animation could look like overnight.
- Your Name (2016) — Makoto Shinkai's body-swap romance between a Tokyo boy and a girl in a small town that quietly becomes something stranger and sadder. A full-blown phenomenon in Japan.
- Akira (1988) — Otomo's cyberpunk landmark. Biker gangs, psychic experiments, a Neo-Tokyo drawn in absurd detail. Still astonishing, still strictly for adults.
- Persepolis (2007) — Marjane Satrapi adapts her own memoir of growing up through the Iranian Revolution in stark black and white. Funny, furious, and deeply personal.
- Waltz with Bashir (2008) — an animated documentary about buried memories of the 1982 Lebanon War. Proof animation can carry real trauma as honestly as any camera.
- Anomalisa (2015) — Charlie Kaufman's stop-motion drama about a man for whom everyone else has the same face and voice. The most adult film here, in every sense.
Where to Start
New to all this? Spider-Verse for energy, Coco or Up for heart, Spirited Away for wonder. Then, when you're ready, let Princess Mononoke and Grave of the Fireflies show you how far the medium can really go. Cartoons, people call them. Sure. And some of the finest films ever made, drawn one frame at a time.
