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
  • 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

    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 biographical work, fi...

  • 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 ...

  • The Wolf House

    Directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña | 73 mins | 2018
    One of the most stunning animated debuts of the past decade, this cracked fairy tale follows a young woman fleeing a cult and settling into a transmogrifying house inhabited by two pigs. Shot frame by frame and melding painted animati...

  • Son of the White Mare

    Directed by Marcell Jankovics | 86 mins | 1981
    Spun from a wild Hungarian folk tale, Jankovics’s recently restored feature plays out the epic journey into the underworld undertaken by three heroes named Treeshaker, Stonecrumbler, and Irontemperer. A glowing, full spectrum of color and free interm...

  • János Vitéz

    Directed by Marcell Jankovics | 78 mins | 1973
    An exiled shepherd roams the earth, longing for his lover and seeking his fortune, in this Yellow Submarine-esque cavalcade of color and adventure. Produced as a 150th-anniversary tribute to Hungary’s national poet Sandor Petofi, the lyrical story is...

  • Alois Nebel

    Directed by Tomás Lunák | 97 mins | 2011
    Based on the trilogy of Czech graphic novels by Jaroslav Rudis and Jaromir 99, this black-and-white rotoscoped animation (of live-action footage) follows a train dispatcher tormented by his past. Set in 1989 when Communism ended in the soon-to-be-former Cz...