Five animated films that reshaped what cinema could be

Animation is often treated as a genre, when it is really a filmmaking language. It can bend bodies, stretch time, redraw reality and make an ordinary room feel as immense as a galaxy. The most adventurous animated films use that freedom to examine politics, memory, identity, technology and the act of seeing itself. Learn more about Five Underrated Documentaries About The Pacific Northwest C1bb.

For Australian viewers, these works are especially rewarding away from an algorithmically assembled streaming queue. A film found on a shelf can lead from a familiar Disney classic to a Japanese science-fiction epic, a Czech surrealist nightmare or an independently produced portrait made from thousands of oil paintings. At Rain City Video, browse the collection for that kind of chance discovery, with recommendations shaped by people rather than viewing history.

Animation as a cinematic language

The five films below come from different traditions: cel animation, cut-outs, rotoscoping, stop-motion, digital compositing and hand-painted imagery. Their importance is not simply that they look unusual. Each one changes how animation can carry emotion, build a world or represent an experience that conventional live action might struggle to express.

That makes them useful viewing for both committed cinephiles and casual viewers choosing a Saturday-night film after takeaway in Sydney or Melbourne. Animation can be playful, frightening, political or deeply intimate, often within the same scene. Physical editions also allow these details to be revisited, paused and compared across different restorations and transfers.

Fantastic Planet and the power of estrangement

René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (1973) places human beings on the blue planet Ygam, where enormous, technologically advanced Draags treat them as pests or pets. Created with cut-out animation by Roland Topor, the film has a deliberately flat, dreamlike visual style. Its creatures, landscapes and strange rituals feel as though they have escaped from a troubling illustrated book.

The technique creates emotional distance rather than cuddly identification. Characters move with an eerie, limited rhythm, while the colour palette shifts between cool blues, rusty reds and unsettling organic forms. That alienation gives the film room to explore colonialism, oppression and resistance without reducing its ideas to a simple moral lesson. It remains a landmark of European animation because its world feels genuinely unfamiliar, rather than like a live-action universe with animated decorations.

For viewers accustomed to the polished clarity of contemporary CGI, its handmade roughness is part of the appeal. The film also rewards attention to sound design and editing, with electronic music and abrupt transitions reinforcing the feeling that the viewer has entered an ecosystem governed by different rules.

Akira turns motion into a force

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) expanded expectations for what hand-drawn animation could do. Set in a violently unstable Neo-Tokyo, it combines cyberpunk architecture, political unrest, body horror and psychic catastrophe. The film’s famous motorcycle chase is impressive because of its speed, but its real achievement lies in how convincingly every figure occupies space while moving through a richly detailed city.

The production used an unusually large animation budget and a broad colour palette, allowing Otomo’s team to depict nighttime streets, shattered concrete, neon reflections and crowds with extraordinary density. Dialogue was recorded before animation in a process more common in Western productions, helping the characters’ mouths and gestures feel unusually precise. The result is a physical, muscular form of animation: explosions have weight, impacts hurt and stillness can feel as tense as action.

Akira also influenced music videos, video games and science-fiction cinema around the world. Its vision of urban anxiety can seem particularly resonant in a large Australian city during a period of rapid redevelopment, even though its social history is distinctly Japanese. A Blu-ray presentation makes the layered backgrounds and carefully timed movement easier to appreciate than a compressed stream.

The Secret of Kells makes illumination move

Tom Moore’s The Secret of Kells (2009) draws on Celtic art, medieval manuscripts and Irish folklore to create an animated world that looks unlike a conventional children’s film. Its characters are built from simplified shapes, while spirals, knots and illuminated patterns constantly flow through the image. The film’s flat perspective is purposeful: it echoes manuscript art rather than imitating photographic space.

That visual limitation becomes a source of freedom. Forests curl around the frame, wolves appear as rhythmic forms and pages seem to open into living landscapes. The story of a young monk protecting a precious manuscript gives the imagery a historical foundation, yet the film never feels like a dry lesson. It connects creative work with courage, suggesting that drawing, copying and preserving images can be acts of resistance.

This is a particularly good choice for families who want something more visually adventurous than mainstream studio animation. It also offers a useful entry point into film preservation and cultural memory, themes that feel close to the experience of discovering an older title in a local video shop. In an Australian context, it can sit comfortably beside programs at the Melbourne International Film Festival or a school screening that introduces children to art history through moving images.

Persepolis gives memory a stark graphic form

Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis (2007) adapts Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novels about growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. Its black-and-white design initially appears simple, but that simplicity carries enormous expressive power. Faces, gestures and silhouettes are reduced to bold shapes, allowing political terror and private embarrassment to register with equal force.

The film moves between a child’s perspective and an adult’s reflection without flattening either one. Satrapi’s younger self can be funny, stubborn and imaginative, while the surrounding history becomes increasingly dangerous. Sudden changes in scale turn ordinary memories into emotional monuments: a grandmother’s advice, a crowded street or a room filled with music can carry the weight of an entire life.

Persepolis demonstrates how animation can communicate autobiography without requiring photographic realism. Its monochrome palette is not a lack of colour but a deliberate graphic language, recalling newspaper cartoons, woodcuts and family memory. For Australian audiences, it can also broaden the idea of what an animated film belongs in a collection: beside children’s titles, foreign-language cinema, documentaries and independent drama.

Loving Vincent paints movement into every frame

Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s Loving Vincent (2017) is a technical experiment built around the paintings of Vincent van Gogh. The filmmakers first shot live-action performances, then transformed the footage through rotoscoping and oil painting. More than 60,000 painted frames were created, giving the finished film the sensation of a gallery whose artwork has begun to breathe.

Its story investigates the circumstances surrounding Van Gogh’s death, but the central attraction is the shifting surface of the image. Brushstrokes ripple across faces, skies and fields; a familiar portrait can change expression as the camera moves. The technique raises an intriguing question about adaptation: is the film recreating Van Gogh’s world, interpreting it, or making a new artwork from its visual grammar?

The process is laborious enough to make the film feel almost proudly analogue in an era of digital production. It is also a reminder that animation can be made from physical marks, each one carrying evidence of a person’s hand. Viewers in Brisbane, Perth or Hobart may encounter Van Gogh frequently in gallery exhibitions, but Loving Vincent offers a different relationship with his imagery: the paintings become time-based, dramatic and temporarily unstable.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse breaks the comic-book frame

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) brought a new energy to computer animation by combining digital modelling with comic-book dots, hand-drawn lines, mixed frame rates and deliberately imperfect movement. Miles Morales’ story is familiar in outline, yet the film makes his world feel newly invented. Characters can shift between fluid three-dimensional motion and poses that resemble panels lifted from a printed page.

The filmmakers use visual technique to express character. Miles’ early movements are awkward and underdeveloped, while more experienced Spider-heroes move according to different rhythms. Text, halftone patterns, split screens and graphic symbols enter the action without being treated as novelty effects. The frame becomes a page, a screen and a stage at once.

Its success changed the commercial animation landscape, encouraging studios to take greater risks with texture and motion. It also shows that computer-generated imagery does not have to aim for invisible realism. For Australian viewers comparing a disc edition with a cinema memory from a packed Gold Coast or Adelaide screening, the value is in revisiting the tiny choices: a repeated pose, a printed shadow, a background sign or a beat held for just a fraction longer.

The film’s physical-media appeal is part of a broader discussion about format and preservation; Rain City Video explains why it stocks DVD and Blu-ray, a distinction that matters when animation depends on colour, line detail and image stability. A good transfer can reveal how much craft is concealed inside a single frame.

Why these films still matter on the shelf

These films pushed animation beyond a fixed category because each treated the medium as an active creative decision. Fantastic Planet used cut-out figures to make alienation tangible. Akira gave hand-drawn motion the density and violence of a modern metropolis. The Secret of Kells animated the logic of illuminated manuscripts, while Persepolis turned graphic memoir into a language of memory and political witness. Loving Vincent made painting move, and Spider-Verse made digital animation visibly behave like comics.

Together, they also show why browsing physical media remains valuable in Australia’s streaming-heavy market. Licensing can vary between Sydney and regional towns, titles can disappear from platforms, and a recommendation from a knowledgeable staff member may lead somewhere an algorithm would never look. Whether the plan is a quiet night in Melbourne, a rainy afternoon in Canberra or a film club gathering in Newcastle, these works invite repeated viewing and conversation.

Animation is at its most powerful when it refuses to behave like a lesser version of live action. These films make images move according to their own rules, turning technique into meaning and visual style into part of the story. Their boundaries are still being pushed, but each one leaves the medium larger, stranger and more expressive than it found it.