No escaping familiar story lines in 'The Wild'

Disney's new computer-generated movie, ''The Wild," is chock-full of lessons that children should take to heart. The early bird gets the box-office returns is one of them. You can never have enough lawyers is another.

As your kids have probably already informed you, the plot of the new animated film is shocking in its similarity to last year's DreamWorks cartoon ''Madagascar." In both, a group of animals led by a lion escapes from a New York City zoo and, after an ocean voyage, find themselves back in the jungle, where one of them is worshiped as a god by the locals and the others learn valuable life lessons. Even a toddler may find this actionable.

A little research, however, reveals that Disney has had ''The Wild" in the works for more than a decade in various stages of stop-and-go development, and that it's ''Madagascar" that may be the carbon copy. Certainly DreamWorks Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg packed more than his pencils when he was forced out of Disney in 1994, as anyone who's seen Disney/Pixar's ''A Bug's Life" and DreamWorks' ''Antz" can attest. (Disney defenders go further, pointing to ''Finding Nemo" and ''Shark Tale," ''The Emperor's New Groove" and ''The Road to El Dorado," Disney's cafeteria decor and the inside of Katzenberg's executive washroom. All right, kidding about that last one.)

None of this matters in the cutthroat world of kiddie entertainment. ''Madagascar" was released first, made its $407 million worldwide, and will be perceived as the original, while ''The Wild" will be reckoned a rip-off and still make a killing on DVD. If there's a limit to how many times kids will watch the same story -- or how many times parents will keep paying for it -- it hasn't been reached yet. Maybe when ''Over the Hedge" and ''Barnyard" are released this summer. One can pray.

Anyway, how's the movie? Technologically incredible, aesthetically pretty hideous, and narratively lumpy: Kids who aren't cynics (i.e., 9 and under) will roll with it. The story line (by four credited writers, standing in for probably dozens more over the years) tosses in some ''Lion King" generational angst by giving us Samson (voice of Kiefer Sutherland), the ferocious star of the zoo, and his rebellious young son Ryan (Greg Cipes), who's miffed that his roar hasn't broken yet. If this were the suburbs, they'd be breaking out the hormone treatments.

A midnight game of curling against some nefarious penguins results in further humiliation, and Ryan hides in a zoo crate and is accidentally taken to a cargo ship bound for Africa. Samson and his zoo pals follow: sassy giraffe Bridget (Janeane Garofalo), idiot anaconda Larry (Richard Kind), and Nigel, an Australian koala voiced with a British accent by comedian Eddie Izzard because . . . Paul Hogan was busy? Along for the ride is Benny (Jim Belushi), a tough city squirrel with Bugs Bunny's DNA.

After a rocky Atlantic crossing -- spoilsports may wonder how the heroes can make the 5,000-mile journey there and back on one tugboat tank of gas -- the critters come ashore next to a volcano that's about to pop. There's a funny bit with an angry hyrax (look it up) and Samson and Ryan work out their issues in an appropriately soggy manner, but not before the entire gang is held hostage by a herd of wildebeests who want to overturn the food chain and install themselves as meat-eating predators. Just a reminder: four, count 'em, four credited writers worked on this.

With Pixar temporarily in the Disney doghouse and the in-house animation wing not up to the job, ''The Wild" has been brought to computer-generated life by Toronto's C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures. Led by director Steve ''Spaz" Williams, the technicians are able to re-create the tawny fur of a lion and the gravelly skin of a hippo with astounding fidelity; the visuals are much more realistic than the Golden Book-meets-Rousseau look of ''Madagascar."

Yet there's no grace to these characters, or to the movie as a whole, and kids deserve grace as much as, if not more than, slapstick and boilerplate moralizing. (Some of the lesser characters, like a Bollywood pigeon, are downright ugly on the eyes.) This is a movie to make you cherish Pixar all the more; where every pixel and plot turn in ''Finding Nemo" snaps organically into place, ''The Wild" strains just to get to the end of a scene. In the end, the issue here isn't originality of story but the larger creative bankruptcy in Hollywood family entertainment that the CGI revolution has brought about.

But don't tell that to your kids. They'll figure it out soon enough.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.