ver a long enough timeline, perhaps every living alumnus of Saturday Night Live will play the Cat in the Hat. Mike Myers kicked off this unexpected tradition by embodying the furry, anarchic Dr Seuss character for a notoriously, almost defiantly ghastly 2003 live-action treatment. After doing us all the service of killing flesh-and-blood Seuss movies for good, Myers was later followed by a more charming Martin Short (via voiceover on a cute PBS/CBC animated series) and now Bill Hader, stepping into the role for a big-budget animated reboot from the oft-flailing animation division of Warner Bros.

Just to be clear, this is the same studio that passed on releasing not one but two well-liked features starring their trademark Looney Tunes characters in the last few years. (Puzzlingly, a new Looney Tunes short starring Daffy Duck nonetheless debuts in front of this movie.) Warner has one of the most storied animation libraries in American cinema (and, for that matter, plenty of great animated TV shows like Batman: The Animated Series and Animaniacs) but as far as features go, they've never settled on a clear creative vision. They seem just as adrift in a landscape crowded with serious competitors as they were back when everyone was imitating Disney.

Fittingly, their new Cat in the Hat emerges looking instantly secondhand, considering that past Seuss cartoon features have been handled by the likes of BlueSky and Illumination. The pilfering doesn't stop there: the Cat's magical base of operations bares suspicious resemblance to the laughter-producing factory of Pixar's Monsters, Inc; the picture book's Thing 1 and Thing 2 have been multiplied and slapstickified to more closely resemble the Minions; and the Cat makes repeated exclamations about the "best day ever!" that rip off the adopted catchphrase associated with Disney's version of Rapunzel. Hader himself was a Pixar-vocal mainstay until a salary dispute over Inside Out 2 sent him packing.

The new gig does suit him, though; his cheerful performance, which has occasional Robin Williams-style vocal-chameleon shifts, is a highlight of this otherwise exhausting, overblown enterprise. His Cat is just one of many employees (Pig in a Wig, Mouse in a Blouse, etc) at a firm that dispatches workers to cheer up bored, depressed, or otherwise downhearted children, measuring their success on an "emotiscope" (ie, how happy they are at the end) and their collateral damage on a "mess-o-meter" (nodding to the mess made in the original book). The Cat scores high on both, and his off-the-charts numbers on the latter result in his boss, Mr Hoogeboom (Giancarlo Esposito), giving him one last chance. The assignment: Cheer up Gabby (Xochitl Gomez) and her younger brother Sebastian (Tiago Martinez), who are on their own for an afternoon in their new apartment, where they pine for their old home town (Gabby) and their bygone sibling bonding (Sebastian).

When the Cat arrives, he eventually – the movie's set-up, midsection and climax are all painfully distended – whisks the kids and their suddenly talking goldfish Waffles (Matt Berry, the other vocal MVP of the cast) into a series of magical lands expanded from the family's possessions. They're in search of the Cat's Go-Backer device, which Gabby hopes to use to undo their family's move, and pursued by a shadowy, gigantic creature called Something.

None of this business is as aggressively off-putting as a furry-suited Mike Myers making jokes about a "dirty hoe" (as in the gardening tool! Just as Dr Seuss intended!). Occasionally, Hader or Berry score a laugh with their delivery – moreso than any witticisms in a moderately slangy and intensely sweaty screenplay. But for all of the attempts at whimsical imagination, like the painted-illustration look of the Cat's world or the encounters with a "psychic narwhal" and other presumably kid-pleasing concepts, the film-makers can't stop themselves from reconfiguring the language-bending world of Dr Seuss as dispiriting American-rat-race fodder. This is a Cat in the Hat movie where characters navigate friendly HR reps and less-friendly landlords before learning lessons of gratitude toward parental sacrifice and channeling creativity into career planning. Surely the lack of a subplot about health insurance premiums is merely an oversight. There's a fine line between nodding toward real-world concerns and treating even the most magical of concepts as cheerfully corporate cogs in a vaster social machinery. Are little kids (or, for that matter, their parents) supposed to cheer when a character gets a promotion to CEO?

All of this cog-preparation material may not be intentional; just as likely, it's a product of an emotional mishmash that attempts to shotgun-spray Pixar-style tear-jerker prompts at the audience. The movie is somehow both punishingly overlong (how does a 1,600-word book push towards two hours on screen?!) and composed entirely of cheap shortcuts, like hiring America Ferrera to essentially reprise her beleaguered mom role from Barbie. The point of hiring a freewheeling SNL-trained talent has only truly been realized by that Short-led (and unapologetically preschooler-targeted) cartoon. This bigger, splashier one trips all over itself in an attempt to work as an all-ages romp. The mess left in its wake is the most Seussian thing about it.

• The Cat in the Hat is out in US cinemas now, in the UK on 4 December and in Australia on 30 December