Words like "inventive" and "inspired" are very rarely applied to the parade of cookie cutter animated features that pass through the multiplex each year, but The Boss Baby proves a refreshing exception.

I connected with its out-there take on the first days of sibling rivalry, the acknowledgement that humanity is utterly distracted by cute puppy videos on the Internet and with Baldwin, a silky-smooth comic bully whose onscreen bark is always a lot worse than his bite.

The Boss Baby, the jokey new 3D animated lark from DreamWorks Animation (it’s being distributed by 20th Century Fox), is a visually brisk, occasionally clever low-concept comedy that’s also trying, half-heartedly, to be some sort of Pixarish masterpiece. You may wind up wishing that it had been one or the other.

There’s so much to like in this movie, but its best qualities are ultimately subsumed in formula. And not the nutritious kind.

Hyperactive, oddly premised and never quite as endearing as it should be, The Boss Baby is an animated family comedy that seems to have all the right elements but just doesn’t deliver.