All grown up: Animation for adults

Animated films used to be for kids, but increasingly they are embracing gritty, adult themes, writes Alistair Harkness

FAMILY films loaded with pop-culture gags may have convinced us that animation is no longer just for kids, but anyone seeking proof that it doesn't have to be for kids, period, need only check out Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir. This trippy and disturbing anti-war film is a sure sign that animation as an art form has finally grown up enough to be taken seriously by filmmakers and audiences alike.

Exploring the horror of Israel's passive participation in the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen – who slaughtered hundreds (maybe thousands) of men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut – it's an extraordinarily powerful film charting the efforts of Folman, who at the time was a 19-year-old Israeli soldier, to recover his suppressed memories of his time stationed in Lebanon. In the film we see him interview friends and fellow soldiers, but rather than construct the story out of talking heads and archive footage, he has chosen to retain only the voices of his interviewees, opting instead to recreate their appearance (and his own) from scratch with hand-drawn animation, embellishing their stories, dreams and hallucinatory reminiscences along the way with wild, twisted visuals.

The result is the world's first full-length animated documentary – something Folman consciously set out to create, even though he remains wary of how problematic the label is. "It's really a big contradiction and a huge betrayal of the philosophy of documentary film-making," he says. "Nothing is spontaneous; every movement takes ages to animate and it raises lots of other questions. Is the image from a camera actually more real than a drawn image? If I'd shot this on a DV camera, in the end it would be a digital image, made of pixels, so is it more real if it's done with pixels or if it is done by an artist who spent a few months making beautiful drawings of someone? Both images are using the same voice, so it's more a philosophical question: what is more real?"

Such questions chime perfectly with the film, which attempts to construct a personal history of an event through the prism of shared memories distorted by the passage of time and the shattering psychological effects of war. Folman couldn't conceive of representing the participants using the realist conventions of documentary. "In my imagination, I just didn't see the characters having any other existence at all. Animation gives you freedom to do whatever you like – to go from real stories, to hallucinations, to dreams, to the subconscious, to the use of drugs – without having to find excuses. You Just draw it. It becomes really natural. It was really the only way to do it for me and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be sitting here if it had been done any other way."

He might not have been sitting here either had a few other notable projects not already begun priming audiences for the concept of adult animation. Though that concept has long been part of the mainstream in Japan thanks to a culture that devours manga and anime, it's only since animation came back into vogue with the success of Pixar that more serious, grown-up fare has started creeping out of the festival ghetto and into the multiplexes and art-houses. Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001), for instance, made innovative use of Max Fleischer's old rotoscoping animation technique – basically tracing over live-action footage – to deliver a trippy meditation on the meaning of life, death and everything in between. The resulting film was a vast dreamscape full of fluid visuals that reinforced the themes of the film far more effectively than talking alone could have done. It was certainly a long way from Disney – and probably too out there for the Academy Awards voters, who chose to ignore it completely when it came to nominating films for its inaugural Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2002.

Linklater took adult animation further into the mainstream with his Keanu Reeves-starring adaptation of Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly (2006). Building on Waking Life's rotoscoping technique, this was a serious sci-fi film that used the amorphous quality of animation to represent and reflect the altered, frazzled states of characters strung out on psychotropic drugs and suffering from the collective psychological pressure of living in an insidious surveillance culture. Pretty radical for a Hollywood studio-funded feature.

It was Persepolis, though, that really began attuning audiences to the notion that animation could address serious social and political issues. A critical and commercial hit since debuting at the 2007 Cannes film festival – and nominated for an Oscar earlier this year – co-director and writer Marjane Satrapi's use of blocky, black-and-white animation made for an illuminating, funny and accessible memoir detailing her upbringing in Iran and her coming of age in Europe amid the political and religious upheaval of the 1970s and 1980s. The cartoon form worked particularly well, too, allowing Satrapi the freedom to present an adolescent's-eye view of Iran's move towards religious fundamentalism in a credible way while also acknowledging how childhood preoccupations and memories are exaggerated in one's mind.

Having adapted Persepolis from her two graphic novels of the same name, Satrapi also provided an important link with the comic book world. After all, the transition from child-friendly entertainment to serious storytelling currently underway in animation has already long been played out in print form: what was once a medium usually associated with superheroes has for decades been a thriving platform for serious works of history, memoir, journalism and literature. Comics legend Will Eisner was among the first to recognise the form's potential to tell serious narratives with his semi-autobiographical A Contract with God (1978), but it was Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986) that really shook things up. Turning his Polish father's experiences of the Holocaust into a chilling and poignant graphic novel that transformed the Jews into mice and the Nazis into cats, Spiegelman found an original and effective way of addressing something so horrific it was all but inexpressible. More recently, journalist and artist Joe Sacco has further legitimised the politicisation of comics by applying his cartooning skills to reportage to document his experiences in the critically acclaimed Palestine (1995) and Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia (2000). Both books offered wrenching, immediate accounts of the horrors of daily life in occupied, war-torn territories without the limitations of traditional journalism.

Folman is quick to acknowledge the importance of this movement in his own evolution and reckons its high time cinema caught up. "Art Spiegelman's Maus and the amazing work Joe Sacco did on Bosnia and Sarajevo, they were a modern art way of expressing journalism. It's very trendy as well. These books are must-haves in every culture-loving household, so I've never understood why animation for adults hasn't really existed until recently. For me, this is a natural progression. I think it's the future."

• Waltz with Bashir will be in selected cinemas from 21 November