The animated world of Monsters vs. Aliens is part sunny California simulacrum, part day-care playroom — a bubbly, Crayola-colored place where highways and bridges and cars are like cheap plastic toys: set them up, tear them down, crush the tiny vehicles under foot. It’s vivid at times, and lots of kids will enjoy themselves. But mostly it’s just noisy and messy, less a place for children to let their imaginations run wild than a Saturday-afternoon holding pen.

Monsters vs. Aliens is the latest computer-animated creation from DreamWorks, the studio behind the Shrek, Ice Age, and Madagascar franchises. Monsters replicates the pop-culture gyrations and frantic pacing of the three earlier series, and it leans on the comic formula employed by the last two. As in those films, a team of misfits bands together to deliver carefully honed catchphrases, do silly dances, get hit, smacked, and thwacked with all manner of projectiles — and, oh yes, complete an important mission while learning a pat and inoffensive life lesson.

In this case, the misfits are monsters, held in a prison-like compound by the U.S. government since the middle of the 20th century. There’s B.O.B., a gelatinous blue blob with no brain (voiced by Seth Rogen, in the film’s funniest role); Dr. Cockroach (the voice of Hugh Laurie), an insectoid mad scientist more than a little reminiscent of the Brudlefly; a pompous reptile man known as The Missing Link (Will Arnett); and Insectosaurus (Conrad Vernon), a tiny, fuzzy bug grown to skyscraper size.

The newcomer to the team is Susan (Reese Witherspoon), a young woman who grows to giant proportions after being hit by a glowing asteroid on her wedding day. Like the others, she is quickly captured and imprisoned. But it turns out that the asteroid that made her a giant carried an interstellar power source highly desired by Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson), a sarcastic, multi-tentacled alien conqueror who seems to have watched one too many David Spade movies. So as Gallaxhar attacks, the monsters are set free to defend the earth (or at least California).

Inevitably, that means lots of yuk-yukking and recycled Three Stooges bits as well as an onslaught of wink-wink pop-culture allusions. And, of course, there’s a bland moral about learning to accept yourself for who you are. Problem is, none of these characters has much personality. Each has a single note to play — B.O.B. is dumb, Cockroach is arrogant, Missing Link is a little sleazy, and Susan is a dependent bride.

Nor do the animated performances, which focus on physical attributes at the expense of identifiable emotion, do much to help. As rendered by DreamWorks’s bank of overworked supercomputers, the film’s denizens are lifeless and inexpressive. Gooey and rounded, with exaggerated proportions and glassy, oversized dolls’ eyes, they’re as rubbery-looking as old Stretch Armstrong toys. They’re blubbering, high-strung computer-generated muppets who never really converse with one another; instead, they shout, demand, wisecrack, and mug endlessly, as if constantly trying to improve the elasticity of their features.

If the dozens of young moviegoers at the screening I attended were any indication, kids will find plenty to like and laugh at anyway. There are giant, egg-shaped robots, monsters who make funny faces and speak in exaggerated comedic cadences, and four-eyed, squid-like aliens who say things like, “The Omega quadrant? Laaaaaaame.” There are a handful of reasonably clever jokes aimed at older viewers, too, including references to global warming, Leonard Nimoy, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Yet the filmmakers almost never bother to talk to both audiences at once. The modus operandi seems to be to pander to the kids while occasionally stopping to wink at the parents. That’s especially disappointing given the artfully audience-integrated (and often genuinely moving) family films consistently produced by Pixar, DreamWorks’s main competitor in the computer-animated movie market. If Pixar provides scrumptious, lovingly prepared meals, DreamWorks serves up a fast-food alternative: crude, indelicate, pandering. In a pinch, their offerings will tide you over, but they almost always leave you wishing you’d had time to sit down for a real meal.

DreamWorks has tried to gussy up their latest with a crowd-pleasing gimmick. In many theaters across the country, the film is being presented in 3-D, which was accomplished via a relatively new process that DreamWorks plans to start using in all its animated films. The screening I attended did not employ the technology, but I have no doubt that, as with the recent 3-D releases Beowulf and Coraline, it would have added an element of technological spectacle. But nifty presentational tricks won’t make the movie less grating or shallow. Even the most advanced 3-D glasses can provide only the illusion of depth.

– Peter Suderman blogs at theamericanscene.com.