30 Animated Movies That Are Not for Children

Takehide Hori's stop-motion horror Junk Head is one of the most hellish animations that has ever crossed our screens, taking us deep into a dystopian far-future where everything is either robotic, evil, slimy, or just plain gross.

Our cyborg protagonist journeys to an underworld of tunnels, sewers, corridors, staircases, and pits, where mutants rule and the monsters are all orifices and teeth. A body horror the like of which even Clive Barker couldn’t dream, Junk Head puts our man through the ringer, getting chomped, mashed, and gradually rebuilt as he searches for the key to saving an infertile human race from its own extinction.

The sound design leaves something to be desired, but considering how the entire thing was made by Takehide Hori on his tod, on the most shoestring of shoestring budgets, the scope, scale, world-building, and overall production value on view (including innovative slow-motion fight sequences) is as jaw-dropping as the grim and grisly effects. There’s a grand existential theme in there, too, one that questions the limits of humanity, what it means to save us, and whether we’re even worth saving.