Animation for Adults

Animation for Adults

A selection drawn from the rich and varied history of animation, with an eye to works for general audiences that push their stories and design into bravura realms. This month’s spotlight falls upon two feature-length films by Marcell Jankovics—a purveyor of trippily colorful folk tales who was Hungary’s best-known animator.

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Animation for Adults
  • The Siren

    Directed by Sepideh Farsi | 100 mins | 2023
    Crisply animated in a vivid, minimalistic 2D style, Farsi’s "The Siren" shows us the opening salvos of the devastating 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, and their terrible human toll, in telling the tale of 14-year-old Omid. As hostile forces threaten to encircle ...

  • Millenium Actress

    Directed by Satoshi Kon | 86 mins | 2001
    "Perfect Blue" director Kon continues to explore the myth-making process and the deceptions and confusions that go into the formation of a star persona in the brilliant, boundary-blurring "Millennium Actress". Begun in monochrome that slowly saturates with...

  • Rocks in My Pockets

    Directed by Signe Baumane | 89 mins | 2014
    Armed with a surrealist sensibility and a wicked sense of humor, New York-based Latvian animator Signe Baumane has long probed the thorny parts of life as a woman. Here, hand-drawn imagery combines with papier-mache sets and stop-motion techniques in an ...

  • Faust

    Directed by Jan Švankmajer | 92 mins | 1994
    Drawing on a cluster of iterations of the Faust legend but faithful to none, Švankmajer reimagines the tale of a man’s compact with the Devil through flights of dark, deranging fancy. The inimitable Czech surrealist deploys his trademark combination of ...

  • Tatsumi

    Leaving May 1

    Directed by Eric Khoo | 96 mins | 2011
    In the 1950s, a darker and more cinematic strain appeared in Japanese manga, dubbed “gekiga”—a name said to have been coined by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, an artist at the forefront of this edgy and distinctly adult tradition. In this prismatic biogra...

  • Skhizein

    Directed by Jérémy Clapin | 13 mins | 2008
    “I am exactly 91cm from myself,” frets Henry, the central figure in this Annecy-and Cannes-awarded account of a life uncentered. After being struck by a meteorite, Henry finds that he must negotiate to the material world—sitting in a chair, opening a win...

  • Palmipedarium

    Directed by Jérémy Clapin | 10 mins | 2012
    Clapin followed up his acclaimed short "Skhizein" (2008) with this wordless and unsettlingly ambiguous fable about a boy who encounters a scraggly avian creature while duck hunting with his father. It’s a short whose placid surfaces belie a latent, buddi...

  • Backbone Tale

    Directed by Jérémy Clapin | 9 mins | 2004
    Clapin’s first short is a game of Tetris as much as it is a love story. It centers on a man whose spine bends at a striking right angle: his eyes can gaze only downwards, his hat perched on the back of his head. The appearance of a woman whose back bends ...