Animated films made for children have long included winks directed at the grown-ups who've been dragged along; it's a tradition almost as old as the medium itself. The classic Disney and Loonie Tunes shorts are loaded with adult-oriented humor and pop-culture references, whether it's Bugs Bunny vamping like Mae West, Donald Duck visiting a Freudian psychoanalyst or the femme-fatale sexuality of Betty Boop. But most of the time those gags were a minor side dish, designed to provide parents a few knowing chuckles in between the outbursts of chaotic silliness and slapstick violence.
In recent decades, as the kidult, media-saturated generations raised since the '70s have grown in consumption power and produced their own offspring, the polarity of animated films has gradually but decisively shifted. This week's premiere of "Rango," a grotesque and sometimes thrilling mishmash that announces the arrival of "Pirates of the Caribbean" director Gore Verbinski and George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic studio into the animation wars, offers an intriguing case in point. With Johnny Depp voicing the title character, a lost pet chameleon who must save a parched Old West-style town from the depredations of water barons and developers, "Rango" is a chaotic assault of in-jokes and movie quotes, pilfering its plot from "Chinatown" and individual scenes from "Rio Bravo" and "Shane" and "High Noon," and adding a surprising (for the genre) amount of violence and grisly humor. (My 6-year-old son pronounced it "great," although roughly three-quarters of it was over his head.)
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