Our edit of the best animated adult entertainment you can actually admit to enjoying.

It’s long been a bit of a movie industry standard that children’s movies in the mould of Toy Story or Frozen come peppered with knowing jokes so the long-suffering adults have something to chuckle about, even when they sit through them for the 200th time. This week, that concept is being driven to its logical conclusion with the release of Mr Greg Tiernan’s bawdy, violent, and somewhat brilliant-looking comedy Sausage Party. The film, which stars Messrs Seth Rogan (who also co-wrote and co-created the story), Jonah Hill and Michael Cera as a pack of anthropomorphic frankfurters – is something novel in that it pastiches the cutesy CGI aesthetic of studios such as Pixar and DreamWorks to tell a very adult story. But it’s far from the first time that the possibilities of animation have been harnessed to speak to a mature audience. In fact, there are many cartoons of this stripe that really deserve your attention. Here are MR PORTER’s favourite five:

Mr Ari Folman’s 2008 movie, which was shot in a sound studio before its lush animated storyboard was drawn up and animated predominantly in Adobe Flash, brings together a series of personal recollections from the director and his acquaintances, to paint a picture of the events surrounding the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, and the question of their involvement in it. It’s perhaps a counter-intuitive notion to think that animation could prove such a powerful medium for documentary – a genre that, by its nature, usually attempts to stick as close to reality as possible. But in this case it allows Mr Folman to depict things that film can’t – his confused and scrambled memories of an almost unthinkable experience.

Akira was the film that brought Japanese animation to mainstream Western attention in the late 1980s. But you shouldn’t take the fact that it’s been so widely watched to mean that it’s anything but utterly wonderful and weird. Based on the manga comic series by Mr Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira tells the story of a young gang member who discovers his friend has disturbing psychic powers. Starting with a breathtaking bike chase through a post-apocalytpic neo-Tokyo, and ending with a terrifying and ingenious dose of destruction and body horror, it’s a visual tour-de-force that’s utterly unforgettable. (What’s more, Vulture’s Mr Abraham Riesman recently noted how Akira contains many of the plot elements that made new Netflix series Stranger Things such a runaway success this summer – as good an excuse for a re-watch as any.)

Dazed And Confused and Boyhood director Mr Richard Linklater’s 2006 adaptation of the award-winning 1977 novel by Mr Philip K Dick develops the animated rotoscoping technique (in which a film’s photographic cels are traced over by illustrators) that he first used in his 2001 philosophical drama Waking Life. Though it’s not necessarily easy watching – the convoluted, paranoiac plot revolves around a narcotics agent embedding himself with rambling drug addicts before becoming disassociated from his own identity – its cool, stylish visuals do a heroic job of conveying the uneasy, unreal atmosphere of the source material, in a way that film never could.

In the grand tradition of The Simpsons and Family Guy, Netflix Originals animated series BoJack Horseman follows the trials and tribulations of a middle-aged man struggling to deal with his diminished place in the world. The key difference is that he’s a horse, not a man, and the world in which he exists, “Hollywoo”, is one where humans and anthropomorphic animals live together. (Cue many zoological gags – Penguin Books is owned by suicidal penguins; there’s a dolphin “dubstep wunderkind” called “Sextina Aquafina”.) BoJack himself, played by the hilariously gravelly voiced Mr Will Arnett (Gob Bluth in Arrested Development), is a has-been actor, who won fame starring in a schmaltzy, Full House-style sitcom but is now depressed and out of work. It starts off slightly slowly, but the second season was dubbed a “masterpiece” this month by none other than Ms Emily Nussbaum, the TV critic of The New Yorker, who also thoroughly endorsed the third. Which means it’s not only very good, but the kind of thing you can now safely talk about in shi shi bars and at literary events.

Cartoon Network’s cult series, following the antics of young hero-in-training Finn and his inexplicably stretchy dog Jake in the surreal Land of Ooo, has many of the hallmarks of your standard, hyperactive, early morning kid’s cartoon: candy people; whimsical songs; a gag-a-second pace that allows it to pack an overwhelming amount of information each 11-minute episode. But once you start to connect these frenetic bursts together, a deeper narrative emerges. It transpires that something is deeply rotten in the Land of Ooo, that many of the characters are not what they seem, and that the wider universe is full of terrifying, inscrutable forces. Meanwhile, characters increasingly seem to deal with nuanced, adult problems. Self-loathing villain the Earl of Lemongrab appears to have borderline personality disorder. As hero Finn searches for his callous father, his gung-ho, sword-waving attitude starts to seem a lot like a cover for his own emotional incapacity. There’s nothing else out there so flagrantly silly and weirdly deep at the same time.