After watching Despicable Me, the first film from Universal's new animation wing, Illumination Entertainment, the first question that came to mind was whether my expectations for cartoon features have become too high.

A glance back at the pantheon of classic Disney animations reveals a real knack for storytelling and ingenuity. Ingenuity, not in the story itself –Disney, like Shakespeare, loves to re-tell old tales—but ingenuity in its ability to re-tell those stories in ways that appealed to everyone. My 70-year-old father often watched Disney films with me when I was growing up and even has a favorite, Pinocchio. Children still dress up like Ariel from The Little Mermaid. Twenty and thirty-somethings everywhere still know the words to "A Whole New World".

But now, my dad who, in his retirement, sees every film that releases, refuses to see animated features. "What, that kid’s movie, you mean?" he says with a face like he wants to spit. Inevitably, he’ll choose the next Michael Bay or Nicholas Sparks instead.

That’s the problem with most animated films these days. Their makers forget that animations are not solely for the young. They’re not just for miniature people who don’t yet have full vocabularies, who laugh more at fart jokes than a clever tête-à-tête, and who still hide their faces behind little fingers when the hero kisses the heroine. The beauty of animations as Disney defined them so early on, was that they were for everyone. They are for the whole family, which ultimately is what going to the movie theater is all about.

Lately, however, with new animation companies building on Disney’s foundation, the animation film as a medium is being taken less seriously. Companies are juvenilizing content and characters by simplifying them, the effect being empty shirts that make decent enough coin in theaters from indiscriminate parents, but lose steam in the hearts and minds of children.

Despicable Me may fall into this trap, which seems to be the new animation wave. It tromps along a little sloppily, taking full advantage at every turn of physical slapstick humor (much to the delight of all the kiddies in the theater), while missing opportunities for genuine story-driven comedy, and in the end forces adults to hum-and-hah and eventually relent this comment alone: "Well, it’s great for the kids."

Despicable Me tells the story of Gru (Steve Carrell), an odd villain with serious mother issues, a team of loyal minions, and an evil scientist (Russell Brand) on retainer. In a world where villains can apply for loans from the Evil Bank to fund their master plans, Gru finds himself in competition to steal the moon with genius daddy’s boy, Vector (Jason Segal).

When Gru discovers Vector’s weakness –girl scout cookies— he adopts three girls from the local orphanage to sell rigged cookies to Vector and thereby take him down. But what Gru doesn’t expect is to start caring for the girls until eventually being a father is more important to him than taking over the world.

Which, in a way, is the story of the film itself. Rather than try to take the world by storm with a Carrell-driven film about a faulty bad guy –right in the middle of a modern obsession with superheroes—Illumination built something so family friendly it lost its bite.

A prime example comes in the casting itself. Steve Carrell was forced into an Eastern-European hodge-podge accent that is empty of, for lack of a better word, Carrellness. Meanwhile, Russell Brand’s aged, scooter-ridden evil scientist was completely devoid of any of Brand’s outrageous, random, egoistic, and outlandish humor that makes him such a valuable cast member. Also, Julie Andrews makes a surprise appearance as Gru’s mother. Even after the film, it’s a surprise. There is none of that distinct Julie Andrews cadence which makes her, as a voice actor, so unique.

While it’s true that movies need big names to open wallets, these great talents were simply held hostage in characters that did them no justice. Clearly thinking the names would draw adults, and the soft jokes would humor the kiddies, in the end it was disappointingly obvious that the cast was all a marketing stunt, not a story point.

However, this is a kid’s movie. It makes no mistake about it. And, as the adults all say, "The kids like it." So maybe that’s all that matters. Maybe not every animated film has to be aiming for Oscar trophies, and maybe they don’t have to cater to the parents as well as the kids. After all, the parents are going to be in the theater with their kids no matter what.

So, in the end, maybe Despicable Me accomplished precisely what it set out to do. I guess my only disappointment is that it didn’t try to aspire to do more.