Cartoon crazy movies

Oscar is the star of Shark Tale, a gangster comedy set on a coral reef. It gobbled up several box-office records in the States and opens here next week. Bob Parr leads The Incredibles, a family of superheroes who retire to the suburbs. The film will be premiered at a gala screening during the London Film Festival at the end of the month, a few days before its US release.

The same day was to have seen the arrival of Alexander, Oliver Stone's $150-million historical epic, in which Colin Farrell leads his conquering hordes across Asia Minor. But such is the buzz about The Incredibles - and the cartoon genre in general - that Alexander and all his armies have been pushed back to late November. Where the Persians failed, the suburban Parrs stand victorious.

And not only the Parrs. Last weekend, Shark Tale netted $49 million at the US box office. A small haul, compared to the $70 million earned in two days by last year's animated underwater epic, Finding Nemo, but still a record for an October release.

And this summer, Shrek 2 scored an even more monstrous feat. The movie took $840 million, making it the biggest animated film in cinema history and the third most profitable picture of any kind. Dizzy with their success, Dreamworks SKG has upped production to two cartoons a year and plans to float its animation department on the stock market.

The first week's US figures on Shark Tale indicate nothing less than a revolution in audience taste. The film has done particularly well in big cities. It topped the box-office charts in Manhattan, the first animated feature ever to do so, and 40 per cent of the film's audience were adults who came unaccompanied by children.

Real live grown-ups, rolling in to see a cartoon about sea creatures. That has never happened before; but, then, there has never been a feature-length cartoon with a soundtrack by Eminem, Missy Elliot and Ludacris, a lead character voiced by Will Smith, a cameo by Ziggy Marley as a dreadlocked jellyfish, and a script quite so chock-full of sniggering allusions to other movies.

The shark heads a small flotilla of star-voiced animated characters coming soon to your multiplex. Ben Stiller, Chris Rock and Jada Pinkett Smith voice a lion, a zebra and a hippo in Madagascar, the tale of an animal breakout from New York's Central Park Zoo; Paul Newman and Owen Wilson play a pair of vintage automobiles in Cars, a Wacky Races for the digital age set on Route 66; Jim Carrey and Garry Shandling add their distinctive tones to Over the Hedge, a bonkers-sounding eco-parable in which Carrey's shystering racoon brings havoc to Shandling's community of tortoises.

And if that doesn't sate your appetite for anthropomorphised machines and chatty fauna, 2006 will bring Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz slithering back to the screen in Shrek 3, Ian McKellen playing a well-to-do rat who takes a tumble down the London sewers in Flushed Away and Jerry Seinfeld writing and directing an as-yet-untitled cartoon epic about life inside a beehive.

Tortoise v Hare will retell Aesop in CGI form, and Ratatouille will serve up a comedy involving a rodent-infested Parisian restaurant.

So what - apart from the replacement of pencils with pixels - makes this new wave of Hollywood cartoons different from the classics crafted in the Thirties and Forties?

THE celebrity voiceovers, for one. In animation's first golden age, nobody sold a film on the names of the actors who spoke for all those wicked queens and canetwirling crickets. But today, no cartoon feature is complete without a roster of A-listers on its credit roll.

Disney's Aladdin set the trend in 1992, by casting Robin Williams as the Genie of the Lamp. Then George Clooney accepted the role of a plastic astronaut in Toy Story and Eddie Murphy proved, with his turn as the wise-ass mule in Shrek, that an actor could make a comeback without even showing his face.

You can see why they're keen. Animation is a nice gig for a Hollywood star: no diet is required, the publicity tour is minimal, the recording schedule is brief and there is no embarrassing costume to wear.

The biggest difference, however, is in the tone of these pictures. Disney's Sleeping Beauty and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves don't contain a single line intended to sail over the heads of the 10-year-olds in the audience - nothing like the moment in Disney's 1997 Hercules, for instance, in which the hero emerges from a performance of Sophocles' Oedipus and declares, "Man, I thought I had problems!"

That sort of savvy humour is now commonplace in animated features, obligatory, even. And the most recent examples have done much more than simply toss the adults a few gags to keep them awake while their kids have fun.

That scene in Shrek, for instance, in which Lord Farquaad's Magic Mirror offers a summation of Snow White's character - "Although she lives with seven other men, she's not easy!" - signals that the film-makers are as keen to engage punters who buy their own tickets as those who have tickets bought for them.

If animated blockbusters are to maintain or improve upon the profits of the Shrek series, they'll be forced to address children and adult viewers with equal energy.

It's a movie marketeer's dream: films that offer childlike simplicity and adult wit; films that hoover up cash from the pockets of punters, irrespective of their ages; films whose box- office appeal extends beyond the narrow audience demographics of the children's film, the horror flick, the romantic comedy or the sword-and-sandal epic.

The figures suggest that Shark Tale was swimming in the right direction. The Incredibles is tipped to do even better. No wonder Alexander the Great hoisted up his pelmet and ran for the hills.