10 Best R-Rated Animated Movies Of All Time

R-rated animated films are still something of a rarity. America's cultural association that animation equals kids' stuff has loosened with the advent of quality adult cartoons on channels like Adult Swim, but Hollywood has been reluctant to take a chance on adult animation in movie theaters. Mature animated films from other countries, such as Japan, are more common than American ones, but they often only receive limited or straight-to-video releases in the States and therefore forgo official ratings from the Motion Picture Association. That's why the likes of "Ghost in the Shell" and "The End of Evangelion" don't get counted among the best R-rated animated films, despite being both great and containing content that would automatically get an R if reviewed by the MPA.

Of course, the novelty of animated movies with extreme violence, sexual content, and cursing is not enough to make such movies worth watching, despite what the creators of certain R-rated cartoons not on this list might think. A movie has to do something interesting with that content. The following 10 movies, coming from around the world and covering a wide range of styles and genres, take advantage of their older target audience to tell great stories you couldn't tell in the same way with a kid-friendly rating. Most of them truly earn the description of "mature" animation; others are sophomoric, but entertainingly so. The films have been organized in alphabetical order by title.

The first film on this list alphabetically also happens to be the oldest (released in 1988 in Japan and a year later in American arthouses) and, arguably, the best of the bunch. "Akira" remains an inspiration to countless animators (how many times have we seen that bike slide imitated?), yet few animated films since "Akira" have been able to match its hand-drawn detail, fluid action, and aesthetic richness. It's simply one of the coolest-looking movies of all time.

Beyond its excellence as a visual experience, the film's post-apocalyptic story of biker gangs caught up in an authoritarian government's mad science experiments is captivating throughout — even when it gets a bit hard to follow. Katsuhiro Otomo condensed his own lengthy manga series for the anime adaptation, so you can always pick up the text for more explanations; but in the right frame of mind, there's something appealing about the anime's confusing nature.

In the '80s, not a single Hollywood studio would touch "Akira" because executives couldn't process an adult-oriented animated film filled with graphic violence and nauseating body horror. The indie anime licensor Streamline Pictures took on the U.S. rights instead, and a cult phenomenon was born. Hollywood has spent the following decades trying and failing to do a live-action remake (including one from Leonardo DiCaprio), but who needs that when the animated version is so awesome?

• Cast: Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki, Mami Koyama
• Director: Katsuhiro Otomo
• Runtime: 124 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes rating: 91%
• Where to watch: Crunchyroll, PVOD

"Anomalisa" was the first R-rated movie to be nominated for the best animated feature Oscar (prior nominee "Chico and Rita" had R-rated content but was released unrated). Several critics groups in 2015 went so far as to give it their animation awards over "Inside Out", though there was no chance the Academy would follow suit in actually awarding a movie this strange and depressing.

Written by "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who co-directed alongside stop-motion animator Duke Johnson, "Anomalisa" takes place in the mind of Michael (David Thewlis), a motivational speaker who hears everyone else as having the exact same face and voice (Tom Noonan). This is until he meets Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who seems different. Puppet sex scenes, surreal nightmares, and mental breakdowns ensue.

The stop-motion animation is so realistic that, in wide shots, you can be tricked into thinking you're watching a live-action film. In close-ups, you notice the joints in the puppets' faces. They're usually hidden by CGI in stop-motion films, but left visible here as a reminder of the film's unreality and the effort it takes to construct animation of this sort. No wonder it's one of our most beautiful stop-motion movies ever.

• Cast: David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan
• Director: Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson
• Runtime: 91 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes rating: 92%
• Where to watch: Kanopy, PVOD

Despite its R rating, "Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc" can't be described fully accurately as "adult animation." The original "Chainsaw Man" manga is published by Shonen Jump, a magazine aimed at teenage boys — though author Tatsuki Fujimoto frequently pushes the limits of acceptable content for his younger readers even by the looser standards of Japanese publishing.

The "Reze Arc" film is a direct sequel to the disturbing first season of the "Chainsaw Man" anime, so you'll want to watch the show for background before jumping in. The film takes a break from the ongoing hunt for the Gun Devil in favor of developing Denji's (Kikunosuke Toya) complicated quest for romance. While his boss, Makima (Tomori Kusunoki), continues to manipulate his feelings, he meets and falls for a new girl, Reze (Reina Ueda).

Predictably, Reze has some big secrets that launch the second half of the movie into an enormous fight scene. A new director, Tatsuya Yoshihara, takes a more colorful, manga-accurate approach to the art compared to the grounded style of Season 1's Ryu Nakayama, allowing the climactic battle to reach new heights of hyper-exaggerated excitement. If you're going to watch one movie where a chainsaw guy rides a shark into a tornado to fight a bomb girl, it must be this one.

• Cast: Kikunosuke Toya, Reina Ueda, Fairouz Ai
• Director: Tatsuya Yoshihara
• Runtime: 100 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes rating: 98%
• Where to watch: in theaters

The other Academy Award nominee for best animated feature on this list is also a dark stop-motion gem. Australian director Adam Elliot, whose previous works include 2009's "Mary and Max" and the Oscar-winning 2003 short "Harvey Krumpet," uses monochrome claymation to tell stories about misfit characters with mental health struggles. 2024's "Memoir of a Snail," about an obsessive snail collector (Sarah Snook) separated from her twin brother (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as a child, is Elliot's heaviest and most adults-only film yet.

Describing the full plot of "Memoir of a Snail" would be to go through a long list of trigger warnings: almost everything bad that can happen to someone here either does happen or comes scarily close to happening. It risks being excessively punishing, yet the film ends up feeling deeply rewarding in the end thanks to its hopeful conclusion, positive messages about overcoming trauma, and eccentric sense of humor. Also, Pinky (Jacki Weaver) is the coolest old woman ever, and the film gains extra cool points for its anti-AI "This film was made by humans" closing credit.

• Cast: Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Eric Bana
• Director: Adam Elliot
• Runtime: 95 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes rating: 95%
• Where to watch: Hulu, AMC+, Kanopy, Philo, PVOD

If you ever felt "Inception" was a bit too clean and orderly to accurately capture what it would feel like to dive into someone else's dreams, "Paprika" is the film you want to watch to experience the real deal. "Inception" even ripped one of its scenes straight from it. Hand-drawn animation is the ideal medium to explore the malleability of dreamscapes, and anime studio Madhouse's work on "Paprika" is visually ravishing. The opening credits alone, wherein the title character (Megumi Hayashibara) pops in and out of shadows, truck decals, and computer screens over the electronic music of composer Susumu Hirasawa, can blow minds.

This 2006 film was the final movie directed by the late great Satoshi Kon (a name that will show up again on this list). At the center of all of its surreal plotting and sci-fi technobabble is, at heart, a love letter to going to the cinema. Its R rating is well deserved for several nightmarish, violent scenes — your mileage may vary on whether or not their abstracted metaphorical depiction makes them more or less frightening than realism would.

• Cast: Megumi Hayashibara, Toru Emori, Katsunosuke Hori
• Director: Satoshi Kon
• Runtime: 90 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes rating: 87%
• Where to watch: The Roku Channel, PVOD

The inclusion of Satoshi Kon's debut feature "Perfect Blue" on this list comes with a technical disclaimer: only the edited version of the film for its 1999 U.S. release, with around three minutes of graphic violence and nudity edited out, is rated R. The uncut version, which premiered at film festivals in 1997 before its 1998 Japanese release, got an NC-17. The R-rated version is now essentially lost media, with every DVD and theatrical rerelease of the film being unrated and uncut.

While "Perfect Blue" is — with one arguable exception — the most disturbing film on this list, it's also one of the best psychological thrillers ever made. The story follows Mima (Junko Iwao), a pop idol who becomes an actress and finds herself experiencing psychotic breaks while dealing with both uncomfortable "mature" roles and dangerous obsessive fans who can't tolerate her change of image. While more grounded than "Paprika," "Perfect Blue" further demonstrates Kon's mastery of animation's dreamlike qualities. Darren Aronofsky owes a lot to this movie — "Requiem for a Dream" deliberately borrowed one scene, and "Black Swan" has even more (supposedly less deliberate) parallels.

• Cast: Junko Iwao, Rica Matsumoto, Shiho Niiyama
• Director: Satoshi Kon
• Runtime: 81 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes rating: 84%
• Where to watch: PVOD

"South Park" has had some of the highest highs and lowest lows of any long-running adult cartoon (here's Looper's rankings of the first 24 seasons). 1999's "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut," the series' only theatrical movie, is one of those highs. Coming out at the tail end of the Disney Renaissance, it profanely spoofed the animated musical formula with catchy and hilarious songs by Marc Shaiman and Trey Parker, proving the latter's Broadway bonafides 12 years before "The Book of Mormon."

Censorship and the movie ratings system are the main targets of the film's satire, so it comes as no surprise the filmmakers had their own struggles narrowly avoiding an NC-17 with the MPA ratings board. The back-and-forth between the filmmakers and the ratings board only led to the jokes becoming funnier and, in some cases, filthier (they weren't allowed to use "Hell" in the title, so they changed it to a double entendre).

It is inaccurate to describe the film's R-rated material as "mature content," because really, the whole deal with "South Park" is that it's incredibly immature — and that's why its funny. Older critics at the time may have felt embarrassed to be laughing, but they still laughed.

• Cast: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Mary Kay Bergman
• Director: Trey Parker
• Runtime: 81 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes rating: 81%
• Where to watch: Paramount+, Kanopy, Hoopla, PVOD

Sadly unavailable on streaming, "Tekkonkinkreet" marked a significant step in the globalization of anime as the first Japanese production directed by an American: Michael Arias, who produced "The Animatrix" and developed special effects technology for James Cameron. Based on a manga by Taiyō Matsumoto, the film follows two orphans with opposite personalities: the violent street-smart Black (Kazunari Ninomiya) and the childlike innocent White (Yu Aoi), as they try to defend the retro-metropolis of Treasure Town from yakuza, real estate developers, and other threats.

Studio 4°C's animation, which combines loose line art with elaborate computer-animated backgrounds, stunningly captures the tone of Matsumoto's edgier art, looking very different from your stereotypical "anime style." The story goes in some wild directions, so viewers should prepare to suspend their disbelief. But even as all the fantastical action spectacle threatens to overwhelm the senses, the central friendship between Black and White has so much heart that you might want to have tissues on hand for the film's conclusion.

• Cast: Kazunari Ninomiya, Yu Aoi, Yusuke Iseya
• Director: Michael Arias
• Runtime: 110 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes rating: 77%
• Where to watch: DVD/Blu-ray

Released in 2001, "Waking Life" was Richard Linklater's first foray into rotoscope animation — the process of painting over live-action footage. His second, 2006's "A Scanner Darkly," was a close runner-up for this list. "Waking Life" has things in common with earlier live-action Linklater projects: the loose conversational structure resembles "Slacker," and Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their characters from "Before Sunrise" for one scene. Rotoscoping, however, transforms this low-key series of philosophical conversations into something that feels bigger. The use of animation heightens the entertainment value and helps express the feeling of being caught in a dream.

Compared to other R-rated animated films, the adult content in "Waking Life" is mild; mostly getting its stricter rating for language and a couple brief violent images. It's a film for adults because it wouldn't interest kids, but any teenager intelligent enough to keep up with the big ideas and abstract story shouldn't have any issue with the material — consider giving them the "it was a different time" warning before the then-ironic, now-indefensible Alex Jones cameo comes up, however.

• Cast: Wiley Wiggins, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
• Director: Richard Linklater
• Runtime: 101 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes rating: 81%
• Where to watch: PVOD

Remember the "arguable exception" to the claim "Perfect Blue" was this list's most disturbing entry? "Waltz with Bashir" is that exception. While "Perfect Blue" is more graphic, the violence in "Waltz with Bashir" is disturbing because it actually happened. This is a documentary about the 1982 Lebanon War, presented in animation to more effectively dramatize its subjects' wartime memories, and act as a psychological shield for a director still struggling with PTSD, memory loss, and guilt around his actions as a soldier in the Israel Defense Force.

In light of recent violence in the Middle East, watching "Waltz with Bashir" today is guaranteed to provoke intense and complicated reactions in viewers. However you end up feeling about it, it's undeniable that there's no other movie quite like it. The Oscars and Golden Globes recognized Ari Folman's unique achievement as one of the best foreign language films of 2008 — though curiously, it missed both awards ceremonies' animation categories, either due to a bias against rotoscoping techniques, a bias in favor of kid-friendly films for animation awards, or they just really loved Disney's safely bland "Bolt" more than anyone else in the world.

• Director: Ari Folman
• Runtime: 90 minutes
• Rotten Tomatoes rating: 97%
• Where to watch: PVOD