It is often said that popular cinema was infantilised by the birth of the blockbuster in the mid1970s. But this diagnosis fails to take into account one striking fact: if adult-oriented film-making has suffered from dumbing down, children’s films are more sophisticated and, well, grown-up. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of the animation studio Pixar, acquired last year by its former production partner, Walt Disney. From late1980s shorts such as Tin Toy through to its revolutionary feature debut, Toy Story, and the forthcoming Ratatouille, the story of a rat working secretly in a Paris restaurant, Pixar has disproved the adage that you can’t please all the people all the time.

A Pixar film typically combines the robust storytelling of old-school Disney with the imagination of Japan’s Studio Ghibli (a favourite of Toy Story’s director, John Lasseter). Equally vital is what you might call “edge” – a knowing wit manifested in sly gags or allusions, usually accessible only to older viewers. I remember noticing this first in Toy Story, when Mr Potato Head rearranged his features in a cubist style and announced himself as a Picasso. I laughed because it was a snappy gag; my then toddler laughed because Mr Potato Head looked goofy. By the time we reached the climax, in which disfigured toys round on a bully, in homage to Tod Browning’s Freaks, it was apparent we were enjoying the movie on entirely different levels.

This approach ensures adults will willingly return to see Pixar films more than once with their offspring, then endure dozens of DVD viewings over the years, safe in the knowledge that the pleasure will not diminish. But this is nothing new. A glance at any Warner Bros cartoon from the 1940s and 1950s throws up all manner of adult humour with in-built longevity. The instances of Bugs Bunny cross-dressing – wearing lingerie in The Wabbit Who Came to Supper, or sporting blonde pigtails as Brünnhilde in What’s Opera, Doc? – could alone form the basis of a doctorate on subversion in mainstream animation, and probably have.

“Our genre is family film, but we make films we want to see,” says Dylan Brown, supervising animator on Ratatouille. “That’s why it plays so well to adults and children.” Brad Bird, director of Ratatouille and The Incredibles, feels that animation is misrepresented. “The mistake everyone makes is to assume animation is a children’s medium,” he insists. “It’s not. It’s a medium, a method of storytelling. Those Bugs Bunny cartoons were originally made for cinema audiences going to see the latest Bogart; it’s only later that they got picked up for TV. They were never actually made for kids.”

The spirit of Bugs, and more anarchic fare such as The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, lives on in the irreverent offerings of the Cartoon Network channel, home to the animator Craig McCracken (The Powerpuff Girls, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends). But, for my money, you can’t beat Dexter’s Laboratory or Kim Possible, a high-tech Nancy Drew featuring the villainous Señor Senior Sr, who converses partly in Talking Heads lyrics (“This ain’t no party! This ain’t no disco!”), and his son, Señor Senior Jr, whose insufficiently evil plans include setting up a night-club and overcharging for beverages.

All of which is splendidly funny, and a direct result not only of Pixar’s features, but of The Simpsons. (Bird worked on the show between 1989 and 1997.) But children’s animation is now tipping so far in favour of adult viewers that it risks neglecting its core audience. In the postToy Story scramble to grab a slice of the Pixar cake, that studio’s pop-culture craziness has become ubiquitous, but its compassion and cast-iron narratives have not. The prime offender is DreamWorks, whose zany features with the PDI computer-animation studio – the Shrek trilogy, Madagascar, Shark Tale – are soulless by comparison with Pixar’s output.

While Pixar uses pop-culture buffoonery as the icing on the cake, for DreamWorks it is the cake: remove the jibes at Disney in Shrek, or the celebrity jokes in Shark Tale, and there’s not much left, least of all that sense of enchantment that is the lifeblood of fantasy. “Pop-culture references are easy,” sighs Bird, “and they give the audience a cheap thrill. But they don’t last. Take Disney’s Aladdin, which I like – when that came out, and I saw the genie doing an impression of [US chat-show host] Arsenio Hall, I thought, ‘This is going to mean nothing in 10 years’ time.’ We try to avoid that. People who know James Bond movies could feel their influence on The Incredibles, but hopefully you didn’t need to be familiar with them to enjoy the film.”

If all this suggests Pixar is infallible, then last year’s Cars, the first of its films to be less than roadworthy, proved differently. While Ratatouille marks a return to previous exemplary standards, it might be too refined, in essence, to pull off the trick of satisfying all age groups.

There’s the off-putting title, a plot involving paternity issues and a sinister restaurant critic called Anton Ego (will children even know what a restaurant critic is?), as well as a fairly mature moral: “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.”

Bird agrees it’s a challenge. “If we had market research at Pixar, like the rest of Hollywood, there’s no way Ratatouille would ever have been made. It’s got an almost unpronounceable title, named after a dish that’s obscure to most Americans, and it’s about rats in the kitchen. Oh, and French cooking. Not what you’d call a slam-dunk at the box office. But what governs whether or not something gets made at Pixar is how excited we feel about it.” Brown believes that the picture can engage across the generations: “Young kids who watch Ratatouille won’t understand the speech at the end about great art. But they can still get something out of it.”

I have the evidence to prove it: my seven-year-old daughter has become obsessed with Remy the rat, even imitating his eating habits. Since seeing the film, she has sampled vegetables she would previously have dismissed out of hand, and is now an ardent fan of ratatouille as well as Ratatouille. In fact, she’ll eat anything if I tell her Remy likes it. Bird assures me that the picture marks the end of Disney’s long association with fast-food chains. “They’ve realised their brand really stands for something,” he enthuses, “and it can only be in their best interest not to align themselves with unhealthy eating. So you won’t be finding Ratatouille merchandise at any fast-food outlets.”

Ratatouille opens on October 12

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