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A personal odyssey, a socio-political critique and a playful coming-of-age comedy: Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is the liveliest and most distinctive cinematic memoir you’ll see this year. A simple, striking monochrome animation directed by Satrapi and her friend Vincent Paronnaud, and adapted from Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis is set in Iran and Austria but all the characters in the original version speak French.

This is a nod to Satrapi’s adopted homeland – she lives in Paris and hasn’t returned to Iran for seven years – and the home of the industry that put its faith in a pair of cartoonists with no previous film-making experience.

Persepolis – which will generally be shown dubbed in Britain – follows the feisty, opinionated Marjane from her childhood at the tail end of the Shah’s regime, via small acts of rebellion during the Islamic revolution, to an adolescent exile in Austria, where she is sent by a family that had already lost too many members for speaking their minds. It’s a poignant record of loss of personal freedom, and a screamingly funny, self-mocking account of the trials of growing up.

Celebrated by French critics, it was France’s entry into the race for the Best Foreign Language Film, and although it didn’t make it into the final shortlist, it was one of the three contenders for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film (it lost out, eventually, to Pixar’s Ratatouille). The fact that the French academy regarded Persepolis as the best that French cinema had produced that year says a lot about the way that animation is regarded there, particularly if you compare the film’s irreverent political critique and its adult sensibility with the rather more juvenile American animations that frequently make the shortlist.

While in America there has been a tendency to dismiss animation as a medium limited to children’s entertainment, the French film industry has allowed animation to come of age. French audiences – young and old alike – seem to take animation more seriously than their American counterparts.

One of the first cult animations was the 1973 French-Czech co-production, La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet) a sci-fi film by René Laloux which won the special jury prize at Cannes in 1973. Unlike American adult animation from that period – Robert Crumb and Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat, for example – La Planète Sauvage avoided parodying the rudimentary animation techniques of children’s cartoons, and instead the look of the film is distinctive and richly surreal.

Stylistic originality also defines more recent French animated features. The Oscar-nominated Belleville RendezVous (2003) is particularly wonderful, with its exaggerated, sometimes grotesque Gallic flourishes and vivid imagery. And the grimly futuristic visions of Renaissance (2006) are realised with a stark, stylised graphic look that is every bit as arresting as that of Sin City.

It’s not just in France that animation is taken seriously as an art form in its own right: in Japan, for example, “anime” is a richly creative and influential medium with a devoted fan base. The latest crossover from the anime world is Vexille (2007), a chillingly beautiful vision of a dystopian future.

There has often been less of a distinction between children’s and adult animation in the Japanese industry, which dates back to the beginning of the 20th century, but took off in popularity in the 1970s largely thanks to the work of Osamu Tezuka (known as the father of anime). Rampaging giant robots are a popular theme, as is futuristic esoteric sci-fi: Vexille fits into the latter category along with Ghost in the Shell (a female cyborg cop and her partner hunt a mysterious computer hacker) and its sequel Innocence.

The hugely popular Studio Ghibli’s output is ostensibly more child-orientated (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle) but even they have explored adult themes, with the devastating antiwar film Grave of the Fireflies, the story of a brother and sister made homeless by the indiscriminate bombs of the Second World War.

One lesson that Western animators learnt from their Japanese counterparts is that, with the medium of animation, you can tell stories that would be simply impossible to explore using real actors and live action. Quentin Tarantino’s blood-drenched childhood flashback anime segment in Kill Bill: Vol 1 demonstrated this, as does Anders Morgenthaler’s graphic revenge movie Princess (2006). In the latter, the tortured priest August finds himself wrenched from his faith after the death of his sister Christina, aka porn star Princess.

Accompanied by Christina’s 5-year-old daughter Mia, August sets out to avenge his sister and assuage his own guilt. The result is a visually striking, thematically troubling film. Scenes involving little Mia wielding a claw hammer above a cowering porn baron ensure that this could only ever have been a cartoon. Says Morgenthaler: “Obviously for me it was easy to make the decision that the kid should be animated. If I made this movie with a nonanimated, live-action actor I would have f***** up a kid for life.”

One of the most exciting developments in the world of animation is the use of the medium in documentary cinema. Brett Morgan’s documentary Chicago 10 (2007) inventively combines animation with agit-prop and archive footage to explore a moment in American history which, he argues, has continued resonance today. The film explores the events that took place around the 1968 Democratic National Convention – protests against the Vietnam war, a police curfew and a riot which culminated with the show trial of the “Chicago Seven”. It is the trial itself that Morgan has animated, using court transcripts and the voices of actors.

But the most eagerly anticipated film is Waltz with Bashir (2008) by the Israeli animator Ari Folman, which has the distinction of being the first fully-animated feature-length documentary. A highly personal film, it attempts to make sense of the massacre of thousands of Palestinian refugees by Christian militia, events in which Folman, then a young army recruit, witnessed. The film is tipped to screen at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

Persepolis is released nationwide on Friday 25 April, 2008

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