Five Animated Movies That Grow Up With You
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- Allegra Frank recommends Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service (streaming on HBO Max), calling the teen witch's ego death and depressive collapse "the best portrait of a depressive episode I've ever experienced," a mirror for her own childhood anxiety.
- Adam Harris credits Richard Linklater's Waking Life (streaming on Prime Video) with crystallizing his philosophy studies around Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, describing the 2001 surrealist film as "an elegant, entrancing call to the act of thinking."
- Mariana Labbate watched Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (streaming on Disney+) at age 14, crediting it with teaching her animated films aren't just for kids and sparking her lifelong habit of going down internet rabbit holes after watching films.
- Kelsey Ables says Isao Takahata's Only Yesterday (streaming on HBO Max) "completely undid" her assumption that animation was for kids, intercutting a burned-out office worker's rural safflower harvest with her whimsical 10-year-old self.
- Isabel Fattal, then 20, found Pixar's Inside Out (streaming on Disney+) healing for emotions she had come to suppress, recounting a child in her theater who, after the closing scene, asked his mother incredulously, "You can feel happy and sad at the same time?"
Why it matters: Five Atlantic writers stake a counter-narrative to the assumption that animation is children's-only programming: across five decades of work (Miyazaki's 1989 Kiki to Pixar's 2015 Inside Out), each pick is grounded in a specific adult reckoning—anxiety, philosophy, creative awakening, burnout, emotional suppression—arguing animated filmmaking engages inner life with the depth of literary fiction rather than outgrowing its audience.
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