For all I know, there may be an endless supply of Shrek sequels in the pipeline. That DreamWorks ogre’s skin is the color of money after all. But there is nonetheless a feeling of finality about Shrek the Third, a sense that the tale has at last reached a state of completion. In the first movie, Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers) met and wooed his lady love, Fiona (Cameron Diaz); in the second, he got to know the in-laws. The current installment finds him faced with impending fatherhood and something of a career crisis. Will he take over his father-in-law’s business or remain true to his vocation of bellowing and smashing things?

Unless the Shrek team wants to follow its hero into the dangerous swamps of mid-life, thus shifting his literary pedigree away from William Steig and in the direction of John Updike or Philip Roth, it may want to leave him in a condition of more-or-less happily ever after. Which is only to say that Shrek the Third, directed by Chris Miller and Raman Hui from a script with a half-dozen credited begetters, already feels less like a children’s movie than either of its predecessors. (This may be why I liked it better than the others. But then again, so did my kids.)

It isn’t that there’s anything inappropriate--no smoking or swearing and only the sex implied by Fiona’s pregnancy and the brood of Donkey-Dragon offspring--but rather that the movie’s liveliest humor and sharpest drama take root in decidedly grown-up situations. Shrek’s anxious, less-than-overjoyed reaction to the prospect of becoming a parent is not something most youngsters will relate to. (In one brilliantly executed sequence he has a nightmare of being besieged by hundreds of gurgling, saucer-eyed ogre babies.) And the depiction of Cinderella (Amy Sedaris), Rapunzel (Maya Rudolph), and Snow White (Amy Poehler) as bored, catty moms is likely to tickle fans of Little Children, a group that I hope doesn’t include any actual little children.

Whether these bits would seem as fresh or incisive if they were not embedded in a noisy cartoon remotely based on a beloved picture book is an open question. The strategy of the Shrek movies has always been to appeal to the easy, smirky cynicism of the parents while whetting their children’s appetite for crude humor and plush merchandise. Shrek 2 pulled off the trick in a way that struck me as coarse and overdone, turning travestied fairy tales into the stuff of hackneyed Hollywood satire. But Shrek the Third seems at once more energetic and more relaxed, less desperate to prove its cleverness and therefore to some extent smarter.