At a special event held in his honor during the AFI Dallas Film Festival last week, Henry Selick made a cryptic admission. The animation guru, whose Coraline opens in Europe next month, was asked why he chose to give The Nightmare Before Christmas star Jack Skellington a cameo in his second feature, James and the Giant Peach. “I can’t admit this for legal reasons,” Selick said, “but Jack might be in every film I’ve done.” Could that mean the soulful dead guy secretly lies somewhere within the Universal-owned Coraline, even though Nightmare belongs to — gasp — Disney?

If so, it certainly wouldn’t signal the first time hidden meanings wound up in an animated movie. Steadfast in their individualistic tendencies, animators have often embedded sly messages and cameos in their work, some more risque than others. Here are a few of our favorites.

Sex in the Clouds: The Lion King
Well, it is a love story, after all. The infamous moment arrives during a tranquil scene in which Simba and his pals quietly stargaze, and the stars gently drift into a not-so-subtle reference to copulation. Or do they? The alleged spelling of the word “sex” in the clouds gave rise to a national controversy when an anti-abortion organization complained about it after the movie hit video stores in 1995. The safer theory? That some post-production folks meant to spell “S-F-X,” for “special effects,” to acknowledge their behind-the-scenes contributions. But we prefer the naughtier angle.

Topless Women and Mice
Disney took a lot of heat from conservative groups looking to pounce on the innuendo of its films. However, while the “sex” in The Lion King was debatable, and the infamous “Priest boner” in The Little Mermaid turned out be a poorly drawn knee, the nudity in the 1977 mouse caper The Rescuers did not result from overactive imaginations. During a fast-paced sequence in which Miss Bianca and Bernard careen through New York on the back of Orville the albatross, a series of topless women appear in photographs placed in apartment windows as the mice pass by. If these fleeting glimpses had the potential to subliminally impact the sexual maturity of viewers at the time of the movie’s release, the damage was done: Nobody caught onto the graphic stills until The Rescuers came out on video, at which point Disney recalled it and reissued a new version minus the explicit imagery. But that won’t keep it off YouTube!

Classic Animators Make Animated Comeback
Brad Bird tipped his hat to his inspiration by putting veteran Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in the climax of The Incredibles. The two men watch the action from afar and appreciate its “old school” spirit. The duo also appeared in Bird’s The Iron Giant, and in both cases they supplied the actual voiceovers for the characters. But the second cameo arrived just in time, since Thomas passed away a few months after the movie’s release.

Not-So-Subtle Inspirations
In the vibrant opening sequence from Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville, Django Reinhardt plays guitar with his toes, Fred Astaire gets devoured by his dancing shoes, and Josephine Baker faces a horde of rabid monkey men turned on by her banana-clad act. Chomet was not subtle about his influences. The movie thrives as a collage of pastiche, but viewers unfamiliar with all the major aesthetic references will still understand them, since Chomet establishes the precedents in the very first scene.

Jack Warner Fields a Daffy Pitch
Every Looney Tunes fan has at least one a favorite short. I have several, but at the top of my list lies The Scarlet Pumpernickel, which opens with Daffy Duck pitching an Errol Flynn-like vehicle to a bemused studio executive. “Honest, J.L.,” cries Daffy, “You just gotta give me a dramatic part!” J.L. was Jack L. Warner, whose ego famously clashed with Flynn’s. Warner’s (off-camera) cameo has an insider’s irony to it: “The studio never knew what the hell was going on,” Scarlet Pumpernickel director Chuck Jones said in a late 1980s interview. “Jack Warner didn’t even know what we were doing or where our studio was.”