25 Cartoons That Aren't For Children

Image via Complex Original

Director: George Dunning and Dennis Abey (Live action sequence)
Stars: Paul Angelis, John Clive, Dick Emery, Geoff Hughes, Lance Percival, Peter Batten, The Beatles

Featuring bizarre, often scary imagery set to Beatles tunes Yellow Submarine is better suited for Fab Four fans, art junkies, and acid heads than kiddos. The strange juxtaposition of classic pop songs with frightening blue meanies and watery approximations of Paul, John, George, Ringo is perhaps not the best Beatles introduction for your little ones.

The script is littered with puns and double entendres, another indication that teens and adults will find Yellow Submarine a meatier, more mind-altering experience. In fact, this film, released in 1968, before the White Album dropped, is credited with sparking an interest in animation outside the purview of Walt Disney.

Director: Ralph Bakshi
Stars: Skip Hinnant, Rosetta LeNoire

The most successful independent animated feature film ever released, Fritz the Cat is an X-Rated romp full of sex, violence, uncomfortable moments of racial and ethnic stereotyping, and tons of anthropomorphic animals. 

Based on R. Crumb's comic of the same name, Fritz the Cat is an exercise in subversion, a big fuck you to the cartoon animals that populate the worlds of Disney and Warner Brothers. It follows the quasi-hipster cat—hipster in the older sense—as he tries to get laid and fit in with some black folks.

Over 40 years later, Fritz remains director Ralph Bakshi's most famous and iconic work (even though it's based on Crumb's work).

Director: Ralph Bakshi
Stars: Joseph Kaufmann, Beverly Hope Atkinson, Frank Dekova, Terri Haven, Mary Dean Lauria

The trailer says it all: Heavy Traffic might be animated, but that doesn't make it a cartoon. Another disquieting project from the OG of adult animated pictures, Ralph Bakshi's Heavy Traffic tells the story of a 22-year-old pinball wizard named Michael Corleone (no relation to cinema's other Michael Corleone).

It's a sprawling urban panorama, capturing a dirty, violent, very un-p.c. New York. Like much of Bakshi's work from this period, the film is more important as a time capsule now, but still one worth checking out.

Director: Rene Laloux
Stars: Jennifer Drake, Eric Baugin, Jean Topart, Jean Valmont

The result of a joint production between France and Czechoslovakia, Fantastic Planet might as well have been beamed in from some place in deep space, way past what regular viewers are accustomed to.

In the world of the film, humans have been enslaved by red-eyed blue giants called the Draag. The plot is the story of the human revolt.

The imagery is surreal, something like Salvador Dalí meets Pieter Bruegel the Elder, more likely to inspire nightmares than keep kids rapt in front of the tube on a Saturday.

Director: Ralph Bakshi
Stars: Barry White, Charles Gordone, Philip Thomas, Scat Man Crothers

Is Coonskin a racist film? Certainly when Bakshi's film was released, the efforts of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) painted it as such. Rev. Al Sharpton famously picketed the film (though he didn't see it).

If he had, he would've seen a movie that concerns a black rabbit, bear, and fox rising in the ranks of a crime organization. Mostly a long, violent id-flecked hallucination, Coonkins plays at satire, plays at being a blaxploitation picture but never gels into anything half as coherent. Which is what makes it such an interesting, singular experience. Expect bouncing animated breasts, lunacy, and plenty shots fired at the police.

Director: Ralph Bakshi
Stars: Bob Holt, Jesse Welles, Richard Romanus, David Proval, Steve Gravers

And then, after a string of provocative features, Bakshi toned it down for a PG-rated fantasy epic called Wizards. The film blends magic and technology to great effect in a way that could be steampunk (surely the steampunkers will let us know how incorrect that is in the comments section, but what are you gonna do?). Like so many of the director's films, it's gone on to become a cult classic.

Nazi references, permanently erect nipples, nuclear war—this film is rated PG, but don't get it twisted. This is still Bakshi and the kids will get an eyeful if you let them hang around for a screening.

Director: Martin Rosen
Stars: John Hurt, Richard Briers, Michael Graham Cox, Simon Cadell, Harry Andrews, Zero Mostel

Based on Richard Adams's beloved rabbit novel, Watership Down is an epic, beautiful picture about fear and paranoia. It follows a group of rabbits trekking out to find a new home after one of their own has a vision that they're in terrible danger.

The pace is slow, and the imagery very graphic at times, but it's a gorgeous movie full of sorrow and triumph, and good entry point into mature English-language animation.

Director: Gerald Potterton
Stars: Harvey Atkin, Jackie Burroughs, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Marilyn Lightstone, Harold Ramis, Richard Romanus, Alice Playten

Bare breasts, disgruntled taxi drivers with disintegrators in the back of their cabs, metal from Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult—Heavy Metal is an early '80s adolescent boy's fever dream.

Each of the anthology flick's nine segments draws on the sci-fi/fantasy world of the popular magazine of the same name. There's been talk of a second sequel—the first, Heavy Metal 2000, isn't much to write home about—with involvement from David Fincher and others, but we aren't holding our breath.

Director: Martin Rosen
Stars: John Hurt, Christopher Benjamin, James Bolam, Nigel Hawthorne, Warren Mitchell, Bernard Hepton, Brian Sterner, Penelope Lee, Geoffrey Mathews, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, John Bennett, John Franklyn-Robbins, Bill Maynard, Malcolm Terris, Judy Geeson, Patrick Stewart

One of the saddest movies of all time, The Plague Dogs, which is based on a Richard Adams novel, is a buddy film at the end of the world. Two dogs that have escaped from a terrible animal testing lab are thought to be carrying the plague. The government is in hot pursuit, intent on destroying them. No explicit spoilers, but know that the ending will bring on the tears.

And you thought Bambi's mom dying was sad...

Director: Ralph Bakshi
Stars: Susan Tyrrell, Maggie Roswell, William Ostrander, Stephen Mendel, Steve Sandor

Yet another entry in the Ralph Bakshi catalogue, Fire and Ice is like He-Man for adults: the men swing bigger swords, and the women wear tinier outfits. Unfortunately, the story isn't half of what you'll find in He-Man, though the animation is strong, fluid. When Bakshi's name is attached, you have to give it a chance.

Director: Katsuhiro Otomo
Stars: Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki, Mami Koyama, Tarō Ishida, Mizuho Suzuki

Tetsuuuoooo! (Sorry, had to get that out of the system.)

The most well-known anime feature of all time, Akira is a grisly story about a motorcycle gang and a young teen with an immeasurable psychic power.  are strong political undertones 

Based on a the manga of the same name, Akira is a triumph of sci-fi filmmaking, doing what the genre does best: playing in the future to illuminate the present and past. In this case, it's the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the lingering scars.

Director: Isao Takahata
Stars: Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi, Yoshiko Shinohara, Akemi Yamaguchi

An animated picture so important that film critic Robert Ebert, considers it one of the greatest anti-war pictures of all time, Grave of the Fireflies, just like The Plague Dogs, will break your heart.

Set in Japan during the final months of WWII, Takahata's film doesn't shy away for the brutality of Kobe's firebombing, lingering on the burnt corpses the film's main characters trek past. The brother and sister at the heart of the film will have you sobbing. Be prepared.

Director: Bruce W. Smith
Stars: Faizon Love, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Marques Houston, Jonell Green, Tone Lōc, Wayne Collins, Jr., Myra J., Nell Carter

"We don't die, we multiply!"

This was the catchphrase of 1992's Bébé's Kids, based on the stand-up routine of comic Robin Harris. Kiddie flicks don't usually get this real about the difficulties of child rearing. Combine that with the film's minority cast, and you have a significant motion picture that, unfortunately, has gone unremarked on in popular culture.

The zany action is set at an amusement park called Fun World. But ain't shit fun.

Director: Ralph Bakshi
Stars: Kim Basinger, Gabriel Byrne, Brad Pitt

Cool World might be half-cartoon and half-live action, but it's nothing like the kid-friendly Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Not at all.

Bakshi returned to the director's chair in '92 for Cool World, a meta story about a comic book artist who gets pulled into an animated world of guns, seduction, and insanity. the seduction, and the animated lunacy of his other movies, but it's not as revolutionary.

Brad Pitt keeps it sleazy and Kim Basinger out Jessica Rabbits Jessica Rabbit, making for a Bakshi flick with memorable acting—what a surprise.

Director: Mamoru Oshii
Stars: Atsuko Tanaka, Akio Ōtsuka, Iemasa Kayumi

Ghost in the Shell, one of the most famous anime features, is a rich, complex drama that owes much to Philip K. Dick and Blade Runner. A female cyborg is on the hunt for a hacker called "The Puppet Master," who can enter cybernetic brains and alter memories. And then it really gets Byzantine.

Don't get too caught up in the bulging boob; yes, Ghost in the Shell has the violence and nudity associated with Japanese animation, but what stays with the viewer long after the credits roll is the careful, intelligent conversation about what it means to be human the film weaves so well into its narrative.

Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Stars: Yōji Matsuda, Yuriko Ishida, Yūko Tanaka, Kaoru Kobayashi, Masahiko Nishimura, Tsunehiko Kamijō, Akihiro Miwa, Mitsuko Mori, Hisaya Morishige

Hayao Miyazaki has plenty of movies that kids of all ages can watch, like My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, Spirited Away. Princess Mononoke, however, isn't one of them. It's easily his scariest film—in one scene, for instance, a character's limbs get severed off. The well-reviewed flick, which one critic dubbed "the Star Wars of animated films," represents Miyazaki's attempt to stray away from the cutesy style that's often attributed to his name. Mission thoroughly accomplished.

Japanese viewers of all ages quickly took to Princess Mononoke—it raked in $150 million during its seven-month theatrical run. The scope is epic: After his village gets rampaged upon by a wild boar, a prince named Ashitaka goes on a journey to find a deer god while combating against a wolf god's destruction of Earth's landscape.

That's right, Princess Mononoke is an eco-friendly message movie disguised as a young warrior's tale. Kids have enough trouble tossing soda cans into the proper recycling bins—they're definitely not ready for the wrath of the lycanthropic Moro.

Director: Trey Parker
Stars: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Mary Kay Bergman, Isaac Hayes

Welcoming all of the F-bombs (and a whole lot more) that can't be heard on Comedy Central, South Park: Bigger, Louder, and Uncut plays like the raunchy, topical animated series on profanity steroids.

The plot is your typical (read: intelligent and hilarious) South Park fodder: An R-rated, animated Canadian movie provokes American parents to incite a war against those neighbors up north. And as if that's not grown-up enough, the film's music, with songs like the none-too-subtle "Uncle Fucka," sends it out of good taste stratosphere. Baby ears should stick to "Itsy Bitsy Spider."

Director: Richard Linklater
Stars: Wiley Wiggins, Kim Krizan, Lorelei Linklater, Trevor Jack Brooks, Timothy "Speed" Levich, Alex Jones

Existentialism of the religious, Kierkegaard sort, not the atheistic, Sartre variety: It's what all the kids are talking about on the playground these days. Obviously.

Richard Linklater's Waking Life has a plot that exists somewhere in the clouds of dreams —seriously. It'll confuse the hell out of children and make them question things that they really shouldn't start questioning until they reach college and start to lose faith in everything.

So, yeah, Waking Life isn't such a good bedtime story for the kiddies. Not unless you want them to dream about discussing pretentious ideas with Steven Soderbergh and Ethan Hawke.

Directors: Koji Morimoto, Shinichiro Watanabe, Mahiro Maeda, Peter Chung, Andy Jones, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Takeshi Koike
Stars: Hedy Burress, James Arnold Taylor, Clayton Watson, Julia Fletcher, Kevin Michael Richardson, Pamela Adlon, Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss

The Animatrix is an anthology without any one particularly inappropriate segment, content wise. The question is, though, would a child even want to watch a bunch of shorts based on the popular Matrix trilogy? Hell, most adults can't even figure those movies out.

Combining both CG and anime, The Animatrix has plenty of violence and dark, dystopian imagery that effectively mimics the tone of Wachowski siblings' films. The primary theme is unquestionably adult: It's about how man became subjugated by machines and reality is now just an illusion. Might we recommend Animaniacs instead?

Director: Sylvian Chomet
Stars: Béatrice Bonifassi, Lina Boudreault

The Triplets of Belleville isn't particularly child-repelling, at least not on the surface. There are barely any words in director Sylvian Chomet's flick, and a majority of it is told through song and strange imagery. But, still, it's nothing like Fantasia.

The plot revolves around an old woman who's seeking her son, a tour-de-France cyclist who's been kidnapped by the mafia. She comes across some elderly, formerly famous sisters who've agreed to help her on her quest. So, yes, the protagonists are a group of geriatric women.

What kid would want to watch this? It's a good movie, sure, but one that would probably put your little man or daughter to sleep. Interpretation: Overworked parents should rent The Triplets of Belleville immediately.

Director: Richard Linklater
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, Rory Cochrane, Alex Jones

Three words, or rather, two words and an initial: Philip K. Dick. His novels just scream children's literature, don't they? With a plot revolving around government surveillance and a brain-killing, hallucinogenic drug called Substance D, A Scanner Darkly—based on Dick's famous novel—is certainly not a movie for children.

This is Richard Linklater's second major animated film (the other being 2001's Waking Life), and the rotoscoping technique is used to even better effect here, making the actors look much crisper and more lifelike. 

Director: Matt Maiellaro, Dave Willis
Stars: Dana Snyder, Carey Means, Dave Willis, Andy Merrill, Mike Schatz, Matt Maiellaro, C. Martin Croker

Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the Adult swim late night show, shouldn't be watched by children, so it's not a shock to learn that the 86-minute movie—featuring regular characters Frylock, Master Shake, and Meatwad—really needs to stay away from youngsters' eyes.

It's anchored by a plot that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. For just a taste of the bewildering plot: Near the beginning of the movie, a giant poodle kills Frylock, who then gets revived by "Time Lincoln." Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie for Theaters is one giant mind-screwing joke after another. We wouldn't have it any other way.

Director: Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud
Stars: Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Simon Abkarian

Centered around the Iranian Revolution and one little girl's growth and eventual revolt against the man, Persepolis—based on the comic of the same name—plays it close to the heart. The main character, Marjane Satrapi, is also the film's screenwriter, and she truly goes in depth to uncover the faults of fundamentalism, specifically how it can ruin lives.

It's extremely touching, but, most importantly, also funny. That said, Persepolis lost the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature to Ratatouille. Unsurprisingly, the Academy prefers talking rats over thought-provoking, true life stories. Their loss, not ours.

Director: Ari Folman
Stars: Ari Folman

Banned in Lebanon (meaning, not even adults can watch it there), writer-director Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir revolves around war and the effects it can have on one's mind. Yes, it's a far cry from Dumbo. Furthermore, Waltz With Bashir allows Forman to fictionalize the search to reclaim his memory after graphic events cause him to repress them with via amnesia. It's rated-R for a reason, people. Shell shock has its costs.

Director: Wes Anderson
Stars: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson

Fantastic Mr. Fox is super quirky, but, then again, it is a Wes Anderson movie. George Clooney stars as the eponymous Mr. Fox, and Meryl Streep plays his wife. The plot differs from that of Roald Dahl's children's book of the same name, which focuses on the eponymous Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) stealing from farmers to feed his family.

Here, the story centers on Mr. Fox's need to be "a fox" and his desire to steal chickens because, well, that's just what he was born to do. Kids might not understand that aspect of the film, nor should they. Kids are kids. Let them watch Pixar now. They can discover Wes Anderson's eccentric charms later.