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The Animé Café site features "A Parent's Guide to Anime". It is a comprehensive list of anime movies sorted by parental guidance suggestions.

The films are arranged into 4 categories:

• G rated - for ages 3 and up
• PG rated - for ages 13 and up
• M rated - for mature audiences
• X rated - for adult audiences

Critical note:

As with any subjective judgement (and all judgement is subjective in its nature) there are flaws. Most of the best animes I've seen are in the M-rated section. And quite often it is unclear why animes are placed in one or another category.

E.g., why "Cowboy Be-Bop" is M-rated, but "Trigun" is PG-rated? They are quite similar in terms of maturity of content. Then both "Princess Mononoke" and "Hellsing" are classified as M-rated, though it is hard to mentally fit them both within the same category - "Hellsing" would require much more mature audiences.

And if a review of "Trigun" ends with the text 'However, the series does teach good moral values, nothing that'll really corrupt the kids, since Vash and co. are inherently idealistic.', is this not what all Hayao Miyazaki's films (including "Princess Mononoke") are about - good moral values?

You would also notice that the X-rated category is hidden - while it is listed on the left-hand side menu, it does not appear in the list of categories on the main part of the guide. Is this omission on purpose?

While, as noted above, the guide has its flaws, it is a good checklist to see what films you have seen and what are yet to be seen. I'd go for M-rated category first.

Updates: I've heard that Japanese have their own classification of anime - with detailed gradations of age and sex of the target audience. It would be interesting to see what are the relations between this calssification and the "Parent's Guide to Anime".

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