A quick survey of last year's kiddie cinema confirms a trend that's been in the works for years: Computer-animated films like "Cars" and "Happy Feet" were among the highest-grossing of the year, while live-action entries like "How to Eat Fried Worms" and "Hoot" were among the biggest and most embarrassing failures.

In fact, outside of franchises ("The Santa Clause," for a particularly egregious example) and literary adaptations, most studios don't even attempt live-action children's fare at all anymore, deeming the animation subset an easier and more modern mode for attracting family audiences. Even 2D animation is out. Supply and demand necessitates it.

And yet, oddly, these types of pictures refuse to die, instead cropping up to fill an unusual niche. It has been noted for years that the animated side of the spectrum, in the wake of "Shrek" and other self-consciously 21st-century variations on classic kids' stories, has increasingly broadened their target audience. The customary tenets of a children's story are still in place - the physical humor, the obvious lesson-learning interplay between characters - but so is a suggestive subtext that would only occur to adults in the audience. Sex jokes and pop-culture allusions abound in stories that were once arenas solely for light-hearted morality plays. The G rating today is obsolete, with the marketplace calling for edgier PG films with more universal appeal. If you can get adults to go, with or without the kids, why not do it?

But the live-action children's movie has failed to find its place in this new paradigm, and filmmakers with creative aspirations in that direction have simply begun making their movies for adults. Even the last of the conventional live-action children's franchises, "Harry Potter," has now descended into full-on PG-13 territory, leading some in the industry to joke that by the time the seventh and final film is released, an R rating might not be out of the question.

That might be going a little far for a franchise valued in the billions of dollars, but looking back on the past year, two movies that might have otherwise been children's products are now R-rated films aimed squarely at adults. "Duck Season," a little-seen feature from Mexico, follows two boys who are stranded in an apartment on a Sunday afternoon with no power and nothing to do. The film morphs into a hilarious and at times philosophical tale of the boys as they spend the afternoon with a pizza guy (who they refuse to pay because he was 11 seconds late) and an older girl one unit over.

There are revelations and back stories, weed brownies and personal epiphanies, and the entire time you can't help but shake the feeling that the whole thing is so completely, inescapably adult. I showed the film to my 15-year-old brother, and he responded only to the loss of the video games and the kids getting high. And when I tried to explain the duck metaphor to him, he gave me a bitch-please look and left the room.

An even clearer case comes with "Pan's Labyrinth," 2006's best-reviewed movie, which takes a bizarrely imagined fantasy world as its mode for exploring fascism in World War II-era Spain. In the film, a young girl's adventures in the underworld add a fanciful allegorical subtext to the more traditional side of the story. Based on the visual-heavy marketing, a typical moviegoer could be forgiven for mistaking the film for a dark kids' fantasy, although in actuality, it's among the most violent and frightening movies of the year.

Most reviews, sensing the potential for a younger audience, have been careful to warn parents not to take their kids; Picturehouse, the film's American distributor, has spent a huge number of marketing dollars to encourage the opposite. Yet last Saturday, in an evening screening at an area multiplex, the near-sold-out auditorium was filled with expectant adults. The numbers for the film's expansion out of traditionally art-house-friendly urban centers and into suburban theaters have been strong, and it was just nominated for six Academy Awards, extremely rare for a foreign-language film. "Pan's Labyrinth" has clearly found an adult audience.

Contrast that with, say, "Downfall," another movie about fascism released last year that was equally well regarded (and even touted by some to be the best movie about Hitler ever made). "Downfall" never expanded from 174 theaters; "Pan's Labyrinth" is already in 609, and last weekend was the No. 7 movie in the nation.

It's clear "Pan's Labyrinth" has captured so much attention because of its fantasy elements, although they actually make up a rather small amount of the movie (much more of the story is devoted a fascist general and the grassroots resistance against him than to the advertised world of fauns and fairies).