Featuring the voices of Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen, Kiefer Sutherland, and Hugh Laurie. Rated G

Once you get past the flying boogers and belching blobs, there’s a can’t-miss message behind Monsters vs. Aliens, and it’s bigger than “Cartoons aren’t always just for kids.”

This surprisingly layered, animated homage to everything ’50s eventually shapes up to be a clever ode to female empowerment. When we first meet disturbingly wide-eyed Susan (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), she’s a bride-to-be who’s too sweet to stand up to the self-absorbed jerk she’s marrying.

Before she can say “I do”, a meteor hits Earth and transforms her into a silver-haired update of Nancy Archer from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. But it’s after the U.S. government puts Susan (or Ginormica, as she’s known to the terrified public) in prison with an assortment of other “monsters” that the real transformation begins.

Soon she’s let out to kick giant alien-robot ass while saving San Francisco from Gallaxhar (a nasty space invader that crosses Mars Attacks! with the drooling saucer jockeys from The Simpsons). Along to pay tribute to the fright-night B movies of the era that gave us Elvis are a second-coming-of-the-Blob known as B.O.B. (a scene-hijacking Seth Rogen), The Fly–inspired Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), and the straight-from-the-Black-Lagoon Missing Link (Will Arnett).

Monsters vs. Aliens pays OCD–level attention to detail on the animation front, boosting the wow factor with gloriously gimmicky 3-D. In the tradition of past Pixar smashes like Shrek and Cars, there are plenty of jokes geared only to adults: after dumping his drawers over the impending end of the world, the president (voiced, in a nice subversive touch, by Stephen Colbert) declares a Code Brown.

Beyond the up-with-women message, there are winks, nods, and potshots at everything from the American military-industrial complex to Al Gore to Mother from Ridley Scott’s Alien. It adds up to a pop-culture-surfing homage delivered with enough style that Monsters vs. Aliens would still be eye-popping even without those 3-D glasses.