Follow up to cringe culture essay: animated film edition

My post about cringe culture, fandoms, and kids media, which you can read here, briefly mentioned how outsiders mock animation fans for using animated kids shows to say that animation is for everyone. I want to follow up on that point. 

I had the displeasure of seeing an awful post on my Twitter timeline that went “the ‘animation IS cinema’ people always pick the dweebiest movies to make their argument. Just post Beavis and Butt-Head Do America guys, nobody would disagree” Wow okay mr edgelord. You sound like a stereotypical Disney Channel bully. 

The ‘animation is cinema’ image comes from The Mitchells vs the Machines, which is a family-friendly movie that many hold up as a good example of an animated movie, and how animation is for everyone. This gets mocked by outsiders who think that this movie uses the “Grubhub art style” or some BS like that. As you can see, people who act like that think animation is only for children, and plug their ears and go LALALA when you bring up good animated kids’ films with mass appeal. Whether you like it or not, animation always has and always will be cinema. 

This brings us to another problem: a lack of mainstream adult animated films. Thanks to the stigma that animation is only for children, we never get mass-marketed animated movies for adults these days, and any movies that ARE for adults are only shown at art house theaters. Sausage Party was a mass-marketed adult movie, but it alienated its audience with its crass humor and kiddie appearance (Silly Rabbit, CGI animation is for kids! /s)

I feel like if adult animated films were marketed more, they would reach a wider audience. As much as I love Mitchells and most of Pixar’s output, animation fans should definitely check out movies specifically aimed at adults. Expand your palate a bit. It’s okay to watch kids stuff, and it’s okay if you only like kids stuff, but adult animation needs to be appreciated more, since it suffers a stigma that it’s all low-brow, poorly animated, offensive comedy.

ADULT ANIMATED FILMS TO CHECK OUT

• Beavis and Butthead Do America as well as Beavis and Butthead Do the Universe) - These are more teen movies then adult movies, and they are low brow, but they do it (badumtsh) in the best possible way

• Heavy Metal (1981)

• Watership Down*

• Fantastic Planet

• Akira

• Ghost in the Shell

• Perfect Blue

• Paprika

• The End of Evangelion

• Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer

• Princess Mononoke*

• Princess (2006 danish movie)

• The Plague Dogs

• Entergalactic

• The works of Ralph Bakshi

• I Lost My Body

• The Spine of Night

• Pink Floyd - The Wall

• The Prince of Egypt*

*these are technically aimed at kids, but I mean it when I say that they deserve higher ratings and feel more adult than family-friendly

I have to admit I haven’t seen some of these, and I really wanna watch The Wall one day, but I know that they are for adults and some of these need more attention 

Feel free to add more suggestions