30 Animated Movies That Are Not for Children

René Laloux’s French-language science fiction animation Fantastic Planet (La Planète Sauvage) was unlike anything else at its time of release, and even today it bears few direct stylistic comparators.

Set on the mystical and lowkey hellish planet Ygam, where humans (or, Oms) taken from Earth are enslaved and toyed with by Draags, great blue behemoths whose technological capabilities are far beyond our own. Our young human hero Terr escapes the clutches of his captor and finds himself embroiled in an adventure best resembling one of Terry Gilliam’s nightmares, where he joins up with a radical tribe of Oms and resists the Draags’ oppression by any means necessary.

Although it bears some distant similarity to the style and inherent absurdity of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, the film diverts from familiarity with overtly adult, political themes and a Hieronymus Bosch-adjacent visual style. Roland Topor’s hand-drawn, cut-out, 2D animation and Alain Goraguer’s psychedelic score combine to make Fantastic Planet the ultimate '70s trip, and secured it the Grand Prix special jury prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, despite it having been somewhat sidelined in the years since.