30 Animated Movies That Are Not for Children

Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s Loving Vincent is a love letter to the post-impressionist artist Vincent Van Gogh, which examines his life while fleshing out his character to become more than just his paintings or his madness.

The film begins after the artist’s demise, and follows Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), as he not only attempts to deliver Vincent’s last letter to his brother Theo but also investigates the theory that the artist did not, in fact, shoot himself but was murdered. It’s a bit of a madcap conceit, but it provides ample space for a beautiful journey through France, and features painted versions of Chris O’Dowd, Saoirse Ronan, and others in its many roles.

Loving Vincent is painstakingly rendered in Van Gogh’s own style, with the colour palette, textures, and scenes we are used to seeing in his work brought to life to serve the story. Like A Scanner Darkly, the movie uses rotoscoping, taking film of actors and translating it into animation. However, in this case, the six-year production took 125 traditionally trained painters from over 20 countries, and put them to work on painting the film frame by frame, creating 65,000 paintings which were animated into the final product we see on screen.