Hrm. Slim list. If I stick to only good ones, even slimmer.
There was an abominably bad French film in the seventies that was called Fantastic Planet. It was an animated sci-fi film, and was lauded as “visionary” and “masterful” by the sort of people who don’t like either science fiction or animation.
Fire and Ice was one of Ralph Bakshi’s more tolerable efforts. Epic barbarian fantasy, inspired by the paintings of Frank Frazetta. It’s been years since I saw it, but I loved it when I was a teenager.
Wizards, also by Ralph Bakshi. Much more adult themed than Fire and Ice. More “cartoony” too. The plot concerns an Elven nation being invaded by an army of post-apocalyptic Nazi goblins. Really. Uses a lot of roto-scoping, which is annoying.
Although a kids film, I really liked The Prince of Egypt. A good retelling of the story of Moses, and the songs aren’t too terrible.
I was disappointed by Titan A.E.. Neat animation, but the story was just pathetic, and the characters were just staggeringly unrealistic. Especially the captain.
I suppose The Yellow Submarine counts. Better music than you’ll ever find in a Disney film, at least.
There was Richard Linkleter’s mind-blowing Waking Life a few years ago. Not your standard animated movie. I think it’s still making the rounds of the arthouse theaters. Uses roto-scoping, but unlike Bakshi’s miserable efforts in his Lord of the Rings films, Waking Life uses it to transcendent effect. Definetly a two-joint movie.
Actually, Bakshi got the roto-scope thing right once: American Pop. The characters have a naturalness and fluidity that few other animated films can match, but the story itself is a mess. It follows a musically inclined family through the generations, from the first one off the boat until his coke-dealing New Wave descendent gets a record contract some time in the '80s. If it had stuck with any one of these characters, it might have been a really good movie, but like so many animated features aimed at “adults,” the story is simply worthless.
Some time in the nineties, Bakshi returned and inflicted Cool World on an unsuspecting public. Not an entirely animated film, it instead mixed live action and animation, like some sort of sleazy Mary Poppins. Execrable. Avoid at all costs.
Bakshi also did a movie called Fritz the Cat, based off the classic R. Crumb comic, but the less said about that the better. Come to think of it, I think Ralph Bakshi has done more to retard the growth of adult-themed animation in this country than Disney, Warner Brothers, and Hanna-Barbera rolled into one.
There was the classic Heavy Metal film, which was much better when nobody could get their hands on a copy of it. If your definition of “adult animation” pretty much begins and ends with cartoon boobies, this is your film. Heavy Metal 2000 is the same, only more so.
There was the beautiful Final Fatasy: The Spirits Within, but that was an anime at heart, and had all the typical plot defects and cliches that plague that genre. (Apocalypse, giant tentacled monsters, and use of non-sensical new age mysticism to resolve the plot).
Speaking of anime… Well, I won’t, since it’s too big a genre and I know too little about it to speak authoritativly. So I’ll limit myself to those films which have got an American theatrical release:
Akira: The archetypal anime. Teenage boy devolpes amazing psychic powers and uses them to turn himself into a giant tentacled monster who destroys Tokyo, and then vanishes because of a pair of cryptic, yoda-like children who speak in sentence fragments. Still, it looks fantastic, and the bike chase at the beginning is worth the price of a rental all by itself.
Ghost in the Shell: The best animated movie I’ve ever seen. It looks beautiful, the plot mostly makes sense (more sense in the subtitled version than in the dubbed version), and it actually has some interesting ideas about identity and the nature of the self at its core.
Princess Mononoke: Also astonishingly well drawn, well written, and well conceived. A fantasy with a strong ecological bent and a very strong moral stance. What was chiefly fascinating was the fact that, despite a huge amount of violence, blood, fighting, and destruction, there really aren’t any villains. Just two different groups both doing what they think is the right thing, and killing each other because of what boils down to a lack of communication.
[sub]Soon we will be.[/sub]
