30 Animated Movies That Are Not for Children

Based on Yasutaka Tsutsui’s 1993 novel of the same name, Satoshi Kon’s Paprika pilots us through a world in which dreams contain the potential to disrupt reality. Paprika is a therapist by day and dream detective by night, hot on the heels of a terrorist intent on using a dream manipulation device not just to inception their victims but bring down the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious worlds, and it is a race against the clock to prevent catastrophe.

Kon took the reality-bending dream logic he had almost perfected in Perfect Blue and expanded it in all directions with Paprika, made almost a decade later. Times had moved on in that decade, Kon’s star had risen (despite limited box office success), and with a ¥300 million ($2.6 million) budget, he brought Paprika to life, with lush visuals and expansive dreamscapes that seem to perfectly mirror the absurd logic we all recognise from our own night-time adventures.

While a film with a similar plot could well have been made for a younger audience, Paprika plants both feet firmly in the adult realm, with some pretty disturbing and mind-bending sequences that dip their toes in violence but often lean hard into horror. Because nightmares ain’t just for kids.