The wave of shoddy CGI kids’ films continues unabated with this adaptation of Serge Danot’s French children’s television classic, later redubbed by the BBC as The Magic Roundabout.

British viewers of a certain generation remember The Magic Roundabout as a five-minute precursor to the evening news, ending with a reminder to children that it was time to go to bed. It was a hokey but gentle piece of stop-motion animation that should have been left alone. Alas, a French and British co-production applied the Shrek formula and brought in celebrity voices for both English and French versions. After general disinterest from the British, the film has been recast with North American actors in an attempt to salvage something from the debacle.

Doogal (Kenan Thompson) is a cute but accident-prone puppy. His love of lollipops and chocolates lands him in trouble right from the start–after a bungled attempt at running off with the local candy man’s goods inadvertently releases the evil wizard Zebad (Jon Stewart), Doogal has to free his best friend and owner from a frozen merry-go-round by retrieving three magic diamonds. Doogal’s animal buddies–a guitar playing rabbit (Jimmy Fallon), a singing cow (Whoopi Goldberg), a lovelorn snail (William H. Macy), and a magic train (Chevy Chase)–help him on his journey.

There’s nothing wrong with this premise, but some essential elements were left out of the final product, like, oh, character development and a coherent plot. Nobody expects an Ingmar Bergman script in a children’s film, but an attempt at rounding out the characters would have been welcome. Doogal and his friends are familiar clichés that play out as expected. The simple charm of the original television show is lost: it’s impossible to feel any sympathy or interest in Doogal and his friends. That our hero is devoted to his best friend, for instance, is stated a number of times, but never convincingly portrayed. Instead, what script there is simply wanders from joke to joke, most of which are so terrible that even the target audience will be rolling their eyes or pulling out coloring books to kill time.

The quest to beat Zebad to the diamonds takes our heroes into frozen lands and volcanic caverns, with computer animated thrills a-plenty and an abundance of recent film references–Lord of the Rings gets plenty of nods–but there’s simply no soul to be found. Instead, Doogal is heavy and lifeless, without any of the sense of playfulness that made the original at least somewhat fun. Like the frozen world that Zeebad hopes to eventually create, Doogal has barely any warmth.