In ‘Penguins’, pets pop up to save Papa

“Mr. Popper’s Penguins” is precious, protracted and pleasant enough, if not exactly potty-trained.

It pops from the beloved children’s book to the screen as a passable time-passer for the preschool set.

Oh, the alliteration! That’s one of the gags that works in this film.

It’s a Jim Carrey vehicle, through and through. But while he riffs and mugs as Tom Popper, a workaholic developer-dad who needs penguins to teach him that family comes first, the trio of screenwriters show a lot of alliterative love to Ophelia Lovibond (“No Strings Attached”), who plays Popper’s punctilious pal Friday, Pippi.

“Punctuality is a particular priority for this prospect,” she patters as Tom tries to charm an aged matriarch (Angela Lansbury) into selling Central Park’s Tavern on the Green.

You wouldn’t expect the movie based on a thin children’s book from 1938 to be much like that book. So what the screenwriters and director Mark Waters (“Ghosts of Girlfriends Past,” “The Spiderwick Chronicles”) do is turn it into a generic, sentimental dad-lost-his-family-because-he-was- married-to-his-job story.

It’s not very good, but it works better than it has any right to, because Carrey never ever phones it in.

In a pitiful prologue, we see little Tom grow up knowing his scientist/explorer dad mostly through shortwave radio updates. As an adult, he has mimicked his dad by putting work first. That’s why he lost Amanda (Carla Gugino) and why kids Janie (Madeline Carroll of “Flipped”) and Billy (Maxwell Perry Cotton) don’t trust “Popper,” as they call him – too many broken play dates and broken promises.

Then the Popper patriarch passes and passes on to his progeny a penguin. More penguins appear. The designer apartment is trashed, the neighbors are puzzled and Popper’s bosses are peeved. But Popper can’t part with the penguins because Billy thinks they were a present.

The digital Gentoo penguins do a few amusing things, but Waters & Co. too often fall back on penguin poo jokes.

Still, whatever desperation there was for Carrey to return to co-starring with animals (“Ace Ventura” made him a star), he gamely gives his all, imitating Charlie Chaplin’s walk (the penguins love old Chaplin cartoons), impersonating Jimmy Stewart and taking a shot at launching another Ventura-like catchphrase: “Yabsolutely!”

The sentiments expressed here – that there are some things a parent can’t afford to miss, that young love means getting your heart broken – are nothing new.

But they are to the people these penguins and their Mr. Popper play to. And to kids 10 and under, there can never be enough penguin potty pranks.