Not your child's cartoons...

Outside of fans of the genre and the Japanese, animation has long carried the stigma of being a category of film that caters only to kids. I bring this up, because I was recently watching Ralph Bakshi's opus to this nation's popular music, American Pop, and it had me thinking - what are the best animated films with an adult target audience.

Honestly, I found the list difficult. For some reason, the animated sitcom seems to bear greater appeal for adults than feature length - The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, Robot Chicken, The Critic, and Futurama all came to mind quickly and easily. And for whatever reason, when these shows have attempted feature length film versions, all have been weak (I know a lot of people liked Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, but I found it to be a half-hour episode with a lot of boring filler that made it closer to 90 minutes - I was highly disappointed).

I noticed as I worked on this list that half of films that came to mind were foreign, and that the more recent it got, the more likely the piece was foreign.

10. Fantasia - When you really think about it, this is really nothing more than a really pretty music video for classical music. There is no overlying nor underlying storyline, just a lot of animation that was years ahead of its time. A pretty strong argument can be made that this is targeting children, however, I have to admit, I gained a greater appreciation of the film as I got older.

9. Wizards - Fascinating piece done by American animator Ralph Bakshi. Bakshi is clearly making an editorial statement about war, and propaganda with a heavy reliance on Nazi imagery to make his point. Inconsistent and sometimes slow, this movie is definitely worth watching.

If you're an animation fan and you have missed this one, find it.

8. Heavy Metal - Flawed, but fun. More promising than it delivered, this anthology took stories from the earliest issues of the magazine and linked them with the common element of the "lochnar," an ancient artifact of evil. The movie featured art and stories from the likes of Moebius and Richard Corben.

Heavy Metal suffers from a problem common to anthologies: inconsistency. The Moebius and Corben pieces are pretty to look at, but lack the substance and entertainment value of some of the other pieces.

Unfortunately, the movie's sequel, Heavy Metal 2000, was lacking in the promise of the first.

7. Wicked City - This mid-1980's Japanese horror-noir piece is often acknowledged by fans of manga and anime genre as a seminal piece of Japanimation, influencing everything and everyone from films like Urotsukidoji and La Blue Girl to Todd MacFarlane's Spawn. Demons and cops - how can you miss?

6. Cowboy Bebop: The Movie - From the Japanese series of the same name, the movie follows bounty hunter, or cowboy, Spike and his co-horts on the trail of a terrorist on a bio-formed moon of one of the solar system's other planets (at one point in the series Spike asks one of his cadre who is returning to Earth why she would want to go to "that pit.") More a thriller than an action film, this is not for those looking for a shoot 'em up action-fest. Think taut detective drama with action.

This easily could have been done as live action, as could several of the films on this list, however, I really believe that any of these done as live action would have lost something.

5. Akira - One of the first feature length pieces of Anime that I ever saw, and (from my own stand-point) a fascinating study on the deep seated lingering cultural impact of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the Japanese psyche. Adapted from the comic book of the same name, Akira was revolutionary when it came out.

At the time, the leading American animation house (Disney) utilized three-layer animation (three cells to create the effect of depth). Akira used five. It created a richness and depth of motion not previously seen in American animated films.

As for the story - that's a little more difficult. Let's just say that the government is messing with forces they don't completely understand.

4. The Incredibles - This one making the list I see as the most likely to create arguments, as I think this is the only one that people might view as a kids film. That said, the movie borrows heavily from Alan Moore's Watchmen and deals with a number of adult themes, including the concept of sacrifice for the greater good.

Death is not treated with kid gloves in this piece - although it is at times treated comically ("no capes!"). Nor is the mid-life crisis of Mr. Incredible which nearly destroys his family.

3. American Pop - In my opinion, the best of Bakshi's films, American Pop follows four generations of the same family and its relationship with American popular music from the early part of the 20th century until approximately 1980. In typical Bakshi form, the man utilized his patented roto-scoping technique to integrate live action with his animation to great effect.

If you haven't seen this one, find it.

2. Princess Mononoke - The Miyazaki environmental masterpiece is beautiful, violent, bloody, and gentle all at the same time. It is a story with a hero, but no true villain - unless ignorance is counted as a villain. It is as much about preserving and honoring the past, as it is about accepting the change that the future brings.

Like Akira, this film is touched by the cultural impact of the atomic bombs, but with a less bleak outlook for humanity.

I have probably watched this film a half dozen times and it never gets old.

1. The Triplets of Belleville - Were it not for this piece of French animation, Mononoke would have garnered the top spot. Belleville is strange and wild, as much an homage to the animation of the 1920's and 30's as it is a nod to those who ride in bicycling's biggest race - the Tour de France.

A deserving winner of the Best Animated Feature Oscar, this film is fascinating not only for its beautiful animation and story, but for the fact that through the course of the entire film there might be a total of five lines of dialog.

Not to be missed.

I spent a lot of time considering other films - The Simpsons Movie, Beavis and Butthead Do America, even hybrids like Cool World and even The Wall - but either the movies themselves fell short, or, in the case of The Wall, really lacked enough animation to be considered animated. Other pieces like The Animatrix, and Titan AE were filled with promise, but the creators' ambition failed to live up to the promise.

Granted, I have yet to see Beowulf, and recent attempts at the adult audience with films like A Scanner Darkly, but this is my list, and I am sticking by it until I see better.