“Racing Stripes” is the best zebra movie I’ve ever seen. And I hope I’ll never see another.

As far as children’s movies go, Pixar Entertainment seems to have created a surefire formula – quirky concepts, celebrity voice work, great music, and sophisticated, mature writing – that everyone wants to cash in on. Nearly everything Pixar touches – “Monsters Inc.,” “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles” – achieves box-office success by entertaining children while gearing jokes toward their parents. Other films attempt this at their peril. Some succeed – “Shrek” and “Elf,” for example – others get the ratios wrong and fall by the wayside – “Polar Express” and “Shark Tale” come to mind.

“Racing Stripes” is the latest casualty. Warner Bros. has corralled a star-studded cast, several quirky sidekicks, innumerable live-action talking animals, and an onslaught of catchy pop music. But this film’s only lesson is to root for the underdog, and it offers little more amusement than its series of poop jokes.

The first problem is the plot. Stripes, a tenacious, abandoned zebra, ends up on a Kentucky farm and charmingly thinks he will be a racehorse one day. He spends the film training to beat the close-minded thoroughbreds who think he can’t compete – just because he’s one quarter the size of his competitors (and not really a horse).

This is Hollywood, so he proves them wrong, and along the way brings joy to the lives of his spunky teen owner and her widower dad. The whole farm bands together to help Stripes realize his dreams and compete against the nasty equines next door at the track.

Yet, curiously, no one in his band of merry animals ever tries to tell Stripes it’s actually okay to be a zebra. Instead, they put their efforts into making him fit in with the thoroughbreds. This is a story of how you can do anything if you try hard enough to succeed through assimilation; if the hero weren’t a quadruped, the problems of this lesson would be more readily apparent.

Young children will be entertained enough by the quirky zebra and his motley crew of farm animals – including, strangely, a mobster pelican from Jersey, and the fast-paced racing scenes are entertaining to watch. But any hope that the humor will be elevated with good acting and writing is lost early. And watching the live animals “speak” – the cartoon mouths are superimposed on their faces – is disconcerting.

The star voiceovers also don’t seem worth their expense. Frankie Muniz is more whiny than endearing as Stripes. Mandy Moore, as Stripes’s love interest, Sandy, and Dustin Hoffman, as his friend and training partner, Tucker, do a passable job. But Whoopi Goldberg as the wise-cracking goat Frannie and Jeff Foxworthy as the wise-cracking rooster Reggie are merely recognizable, and mildly annoying, placeholders.

When the plot starts really getting slow, Joe Pantoliano’s pelican and the horsefly duo of Steve Harvey and David Spade swoop in with flatulence and excrement jokes to save the day.

The live actors do their best, but are treated like scenery for most of the film, so they don’t have much to work with. Bruce Greenwood puts in a remarkably solid performance as the widowed farmer, Nolan Walsh, and Wendy Malick gives her trademark performance as the inexplicably bitchy character. But Hayden Panettiere gets bogged down in her thick Kentucky accent as Walsh’s plucky daughter.

With four writers, numerous big names, and a massive marketing blitz at its disposal, “Racing Stripes” should have been a sure thing. As it is, Snoop Dogg’s hound dog, Lightning, voices the movie’s true moral: You can put your shoes in the oven, but that don’t make them biscuits.