30 Animated Movies That Are Not for Children

Time was, you couldn’t see a bargain bin without a copy of The Animatrix in it, but that’s no comment on the quality of the Matrix-adjacent anthology feature - more proof of how prevalent it was at the time.

Animated in a variety of different styles, The Animatrix brings together writer-directors from Japan and America on eight different stories, overseen by the Wachowskis, and forming a crucial part of the Matrix mythos. And the stories range from grand worldbuilding epics to small, personal curiosities.

In Mahiro Maeda’s The Second Renaissance we get to witness the decline of humanity, the rise of AI and the human-machine war in all its glory; Shinichirō Watanabe’s Kid’s Story shows the origins of Kid from the films, a young man who uses his awareness of and belief in Neo to wake himself from the Matrix; and Andy Jones’ Final Flight of the Osiris sees Captain Thadeus and his crew discover the machines’ efforts to drill their way into the free human city Zion, setting up the larger conflict of The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions.  

These are just a taste of what’s on offer, with lush 2D and 3D animation, in a range of styles both hand-drawn and computer-animated, including a surprisingly small-scale but affecting effort from visual master Takeshi Koike (Redline). And it should go without saying that there’s blood, violence and challenging concepts throughout.