Before You're Shocked by 'Sausage Party,' Here Are Our 5 Favorite R-Rated Animated Movies
This Friday’s Sausage Party is an animated adventure about talking food items that embark on an epic quest through a grocery store to understand their true destiny. Despite its anthropomorphic-oriented action, however, it’s anything but family-friendly. Conceived by Superbad masterminds Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen (who voices the film’s hero hot dog Frank), the film is a stunningly raunchy affair that culminates with arguably the dirtiest non-live-action sequence ever committed to film. In other words, it more than earns its R rating. In celebration of this profane comedy, and with all due respect to other adult-skewing animated features that earned different MPAA ratings (Fritz the Cat, Persepolis, Ghost in the Shell), we’ve assembled our own picks for the five best R-rated animated movies — all of which, it should go without saying, are definitely not for kids.
Akira (1988)
Katsuhiro Otomo’s enduring sci-fi masterpiece — an adaptation of his own popular Japanese manga — is a futuristic head-trip of dystopian action and otherworldly nightmares. Set in a 21st-century Neo-Tokyo decades after a nuclear detonation led to World War III, this out-there tale concerns the efforts of various entities — a biker gang, government agents, rebels — to cope with a teen boy named Tetsuo who gains psychic powers and becomes intent on awakening the legendary super-powered Akira. With visuals that that are still stunning nearly 30 years later, and with a far-fetched narrative rooted in apocalyptic terror, it remains the most influential animé ever produced and one of the finest genre works of the modern era.
Perfect Blue (1997)
Satoshi Kon is one of animé’s most psychologically incisive and surrealistic auteurs, and he began earning that reputation with this 1997 debut. Perfect Blue is a twisty-turny thriller about a pop star who aims to make a name for herself as an actress and the ghoulish fan who soon begins stalking her. With the line between dreams and reality quickly beginning to blur, Kon’s maiden directorial effort is reminiscent of the movies of Alfred Hitchcock and Italian “giallo” master Dario Argento (Suspiria, Opera). Featuring both nudity and bloodshed, as well as a healthy dose of lyrical symbolism, this beguiling feature proves to be a penetrating look at the pitfalls of fame and the relationship between art and both artist and consumer.
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)
The 1999 big-screen debut of Matt Parker and Trey Stone’s Comedy Central cartoon had to struggle to get an “R” designation from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The organization’s stance toward swearwords and violence is hilariously skewered in this dirty musical comedy, which details a brewing conflict between the U.S. and Canada that’s initiated by Kyle, Cartman, Stan, and Kenny sneaking into a theater to see an R-rated “Terrance and Phillip” blockbuster. Parodying everything from classic Broadway and Hollywood song-and-dance epics to beloved Disney sagas — as well as Saddam Hussein, who is portrayed as the lover of Satan — it’s an uproariously inventive, foul-mouthed, self-referential anti-censorship gem.
A Scanner Darkly (2006)
More narrative-driven (and haunting) than the director’s prior animated movie, Waking Life (2001), Richard Linklater’s 2006 adaptation of cyberpunk godfather Philip K. Dick’s novel uses “rotoscopping” — i.e., live action covered in computer animation — for a story about a cop (Keanu Reeves) who employs a sci-fi suit to change his external appearance and go undercover to bust up a narcotics ring. Those aesthetics lend ominous, fluctuating beauty to a story concerned with the instability of identity and the way in which drugs further accentuate a loss of one’s sense of self. Also featuring Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, and Woody Harrelson, Linklater’s mournful film is at once hypnotic and — in its many scenes of anxious chitchat — attuned to the alternately unifying and alienating power of conversation.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (2007)
Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis’s adaptation of their “Adult Swim” Cartoon Network TV series was built for its fans – as well as aficionados of the truly surreal. This feature is a mind-bogglingly nonsensical, plot-free whatsit that defies anything approaching a lucid synopsis. Focused on nonaquatic, nonteenage fast-food heroes Master Shake (a milkshake), Frylock (a flying box of french fries), and Meatwad (a wad of meat), this 90-minute New Jersey saga is as avant-garde as anything released in an American movie theater over the past decade. Making no concessions to formula, coherence, or sanity, this blast of abstract lunacy – commencing with perhaps the greatest non-sequitur opening (involving death-metal-playing refreshment stand items) in cinematic history – stands as a truly original off-the-wall work.
Honorable Mentions:
Heavy Metal (1981)
Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)
Waking Life (2001)
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001)
Paprika (2006)
