SpongeBob SquarePants and life after Pixar

I saw the SpongeBob SquarePants Movie recently, and it got me thinking. It's a truism that The Simpsons popularised mainstream animation that adults could watch too. Part of the show's great appeal was that there really was something for everyone - it could make adults laugh without being "unsuitable" for or unintelligible to children. But making it ok for adults to watch cartoons opened other possibilities and room for more innovation that was not immeadiately explored. South Park was perhaps a natural development - far more cutting edge, although its appeal to kids was in my opinion no smaller than that of The Simpsons; the kids just had to hope their parents weren't watching. But although South Park was far ruder and often much darker than The Simpsons, however inventive it was, and is, it never really stepped outside the boundaries laid down by The Simpsons and its siblings (Futurama, Family Guy etc.).
Adult Swim, I would venture, achieved this move, becoming "cult" rather than mainstream as a result - initially at least; a New York Times feature surely indicates mainstream acceptance. For my money, Adult Swim and its growing popularity is a very welcome development indeed. Its great merit in my view is that it embraces absurdity and doesn't bother too much about convention - deliberately rejecting it at times.
Rejecting convention and exploring what can be done outside of established norms is what drives artistic innovation and in my view not only what keeps art interesting, but what makes is interesting. It also carries great risks though. By refusing to follow "the rules" you take the risk of producing something awful in the hope of producing something spectacular. This is why, in this instance at least, innovation in television (cheap to produce) is feeding in to innovation in cinema (expensive to produce) - specifically, the SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, which is absolutely triumphant in incorporating utter absurdity back in to animation that has a direct and primary appeal to kids. This makes for far more enjoyable viewing than what I've seen of Pixar, which for adult-appealing humour offers little beyond slapstick and "witty" referencing (the running joke of Shrek was retelling countless traditional children's stories, but with a donkey...). Pixar is fine for what it is, and the efforts to include "something for adults" do make the films far more watchable for an older audience than the nauseating Disney "classics". But by making a film for children and inserting jokes for their parents, Pixar missed out on a form of humour that appeals to everyone: the absurd. The triumph of SpongeBob SquarePants is that it utilizes absurdity within the context of a children's film, producing something that does not raise a smile, but rather makes you fall out of your seat.
Of course, The Incredibles grossed much higher than SpongeBob, but I very much hope that a precedent has been set, and wouldn't be surprised to find Pixar and others drawing lessons from the film; I certainly hope so.