Doctor Dolittle (the 1998 version) finds cinema at the precipice of the CGI takeover (post-Toy Story, pre-Shrek). It combines the rubbery elasticity of practical creature effects with the early wobbles of CGI. The mode recalls Disney’s live-action oddities and musicals from earlier decades, like Darby O’Gill and the Little People. They didn’t have CGI, but they had the same wholesome, adventurous, rewind-the-VHS spirit. In fact, many of these ‘90s movies — Flubber, The Nutty Professor, George of the Jungle, and this — were revivals of IP, less out of reverence than as trust of tried-and-true premises that would tickle parents’ nostalgia and appeal to kids. The ‘90s versions of these stories are mostly springboards for marquee stars to mug, riff, and learn a heartfelt lesson from a talking animal or CGI creation, with an extra layer of fart jokes and post-Simpsons sarcasm.

Doctor Dolittle kicks off with five-year-old John Dolittle (Dari Gerard Smith) chatting it up with the family dog, blissfully unaware that this is not typical kindergarten behavior. When his canine-pal’s advice to get to know someone by sniffing their butt backfires, John’s dad (Ossie Davis) brings in a priest for an exorcism. The shame of the incident shuts down John’s animal-talking powers for three decades until a near-miss car accident with a dog named Lucky flips the switch back on. Grown-up John (Eddie Murphy) is now a high-functioning surgeon with a busy suburban family. But he finds himself hearing animal voices once more, and before long is doing medical consults for pigeons, rats, and a tiger with a debilitating migraine. Hijinks ensue. In the background is the future of John’s medical practice as he considers selling it to a big corporation to line his family’s pockets but lose touch with his compassion.

If you’re familiar with the books or have read my review of the 1967 film or 1928 shorts, you will notice that this really isn’t an adaptation of the Hugh Lofting books at all, but a total reinvention and modernization. That is fine by me. Despite my binge and coverage of films with the “Dolittle” moniker, I hold little reverence for the source IP. The original Dr. Dolittle books excel more as a talk-to-the-animals springboard than an actual story or character sketch. They have a lot of baggage of imperialism and racial insensitivity that is understandable in the context of the publication of the book series but tough to reckon with decades later.

I’m inclined to give any “live-action-cartoon” movie that puts forth a good faith effort and a brisk runtime a baseline grade of C-plus (read: 4 out of 8 on the Is It Good? Scale). But I need not equivocate too much with Doctor Dolittle. It’s not the funniest movie of its ‘90s batch of films (Men in Black, probably), nor the benefactor of the most cheerful vibes (George of the Jungle, probably), but the screenplay has shape and more heft than I expected. That’s what gives it the tiniest bump into positive territory (and my favorite Doctor Dolittle adaptation), even with the unrefined humor.

Unlike the 1967 musical and the many Dolittle books upon which these are ostensibly based, the story here has a coherent internal arc for the title character. The film is a solid blend of shenanigans and character development. This isn’t strictly about cavorting with a pushmi-pullyu (though one does show up briefly as a little nod). Instead, it’s about a man confronting his inner weirdness and growing stronger from it. It’s a classic self-actualization story, but thoughtfully rendered given the target audience and tone. The story offers a tidy thematic overlap between John’s rediscovery of his gift and the film’s corporate B-plot, in which he has to decide whether to sell his life’s work to a soulless conglomerate. And while the film doesn’t make a big point of it, it even offers a subtle charge in seeing a Black doctor navigating a white corporate world, his difference treated as a burden until it becomes a strength. (It is much sharper in this regard than Ghost Dad.)

But the real draw here is, of course, the talking animals. Director Betty Thomas, with a boost from the Jim Henson Creature Shop, nails the look and spirit, with effects that still mostly hold up. It’s nearly Babe-tier in terms of animal expressiveness, of animatronics and CGI that blend seamlessly. In some moments I honestly wasn’t sure whether I was looking at a puppet, a digitally enhanced dog, or just a very well-trained collie. The production MVP is Lucky, voiced by Norm Macdonald, whose droll delivery is welcome. (Macdonald continued voicing Lucky through all four of this movie’s sequels, including the DTV releases.)

I won’t pretend the film is a work of high art or a comic masterpiece. Its main joke is: Butts are funny. (And what’s wrong with that? Butts are funny. They smell bad. They are big and fleshy and slightly awkward. Even as children, we are inexplicably drawn to them.) That’s the flip side of being a shameless ‘90s family comedy: The script is absolutely riddled with body part and function gags calibrated for maximum second-grader satisfaction. Subjectively, I find it toes right up to “obnoxious” without entirely crossing over that line, though your mileage may vary.

One of the most surprising choices the film makes is placing John Dolittle as a straight man. Eddie Murphy gets to be funny, but it’s remarkably restrained relative to the likes of The Nutty Professor and Norbit. Even stranger still, Murphy actually acts a little: He plays John as a man teetering on the edge, trying to keep his life together while animal chaos stews around him. It’s a surprisingly unfussy and assured lead performance, though not exactly Oscar material.

Despite negative reviews, Doctor Dolittle was the sixth-highest grossing film in the U.S. in 1998. We tweens craved these kinds of movies. Inevitably, Fox made a sequel and a string of lower-rent, direct-to-video spin-offs. It’s no long-lost gem, but I find Doctor Dolittle to be weirdly satisfying, though I admit I cannot entirely separate it from my nostalgia for its ilk of summer cinema. It is a time capsule of an era when a family movie required actual sets, actors, and production. It has a solid R&B soundtrack. It is 88 minutes long. Make America greenlight mid-budget family comedies again.

So here’s where I swoop in and say, “not so fast,” right? I’m always a bit of a skeptic of universal praise or universal hatred, so I came in hoping to like this. To quote Kinemalogue’s Hunter Allen on his Letterboxd capsule of this film: “I like liking things.” Amen to that. But alas. I don’t like it. I do not think it is the worst Best Picture nominee of all time, not when Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close exists, but I will unfortunately not be the contrarian here.

Doctor Dolittle has its charms, though. In fact, many of the traits that got it labeled stodgy in its day are now endearingly old-fashioned: It’s a massive, lumbering, whimsical musical with a shaggy plot. It relishes its own sprawl. Its production offers something you might generously call grandeur: elaborate sets, a huge menagerie of animals, and a busy original recitative score by Leslie Bricusse (who also wrote the screenplay). The many millions of dollars that Fox poured into it offered a baseline of watchable Hollywood spectacle even though it never goes much past that baseline.

The story draws from three of Hugh Lofting’s Dolittle books: The Story of Doctor Dolittle (as also seen in the 1928 adaptation), The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, and Doctor Dolittle’s Circus (books 1, 2 and 4 in the series, respectively). This helps explain the film’s meandering structure. We’re introduced to the eccentric Doctor John Dolittle (Rex Harrison), a former physician turned animal whisperer and vet; his lackey Matthew (Anthony Newley); young apprentice Tommy (William Dix); and a talkative macaw named Polynesia (voiced by Ginny Tyler) who teaches Dolittle how to understand animal “language” via gestures. (Notably, no voiceover of the animals “talking” other than Polynesia.) The character of Emma Fairfax (Samantha Eggar) is a movie invention, here to lend the film some misguided feminine charm and romantic ballast.

The plot starts as a sort of English countryside hangout film: Dolittle’s Victorian home doubles as a zoo of sorts, which makes him persona non grata to the fuddy-duddies of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. After a slow flashback introducing this setup, the borderline-nonsense episodes ensue: His attempt to finance a new expedition leads to him showcasing a two-headed llama called a pushmi-pullyu at a circus. He also falls in love with a lady seal and helps her return home by tossing her into the ocean in a human disguise. This results in his arrest for murder, as spectators believe he threw an actual person off a cliff. This, in turn, leads to a courtroom drama sequence debating the merits of vegetarianism. Dr. Dolittle escapes the attempts of the masses to throw him in an insane asylum, which sets off a globetrotting quest for a giant pink snail…

That’s a whole lot of plot, and yet all of that narrative gibberish happens before the intermission. Even more insanely, the film packs in all of that and somehow still has a leaden, get-on-with-it-already pacing.

The second half kicks off with Dolittle setting sail, flanked by his crew: Matthew, Tommy, a few animals, and Emma, who pivots from spunky, aristocracy-spiting feminist to horribly executed romantic interest for the seemingly asexual (or maybe seal-sexual) Dr. Dolittle. And the rest of the film follows their journey and visit to the exotic Sea Star Island.

Sea Star Island, the potential grand payoff, plays like a fever dream, with Bricusse scrambling to subvert the racism of Lofting’s books. The natives are unexpectedly wise and articulate, their leader named Willie Shakespeare (Geoffrey Holder), a reinvention of “Prince Bumpo” of the books. Eventually, we meet the pink snail. It’s not a detailed or intricate construction, but I actually like its imposing, alien, abstract design. I particularly enjoyed the short scene set inside its fake-glass body.

Across its bloated runtime, some of Doctor Dolittle’s episodes are mildly charming in isolation, but the big storytelling problem is that Bricusse and director Richard Fleischer fail to string them together with any energy or direction. Where a film like Mary Poppins spins its digressions with a delightful sense of childlike wonder that accumulates to a feeling of grand giddiness, Doctor Dolittle offers meandering nothings that rarely connect emotionally or dramatically. Every new incident feels like another 20-minute detour and another deflation of momentum.

Plenty of bad storytelling decisions compound the sense of narrative malaise. The late-breaking romance between Dolittle and Emma is a catastrophic misfire. The winking narrative moments, like Dolittle blindly guessing the exact spot in the world that the snail would show up, offer serious eye rolls rather than any sort of amusement. And the acting chemistry is all off; Harrison’s presence is haughty rather than delightful, and he has no rapport with anyone else in the cast.

Doctor Dolittle is also not much of a musical. Most of the soundtrack is built around Harrison’s tuneless singing style, half-declared half-mumbled, which is certainly a swing (or maybe an anti-swing) and motivated by maximizing the talents of the actor. Harrison is admittedly quite good at the kind of “singing” asked of him. But the result is that nothing is an earworm as performed; that “Talk to the Animals” won an Oscar and became a standard is a triumph of marketing. Multiple big-name artists released their own versions of the song (and others in the soundtrack) with the film’s release, and it’s telling that it’s hard to find clips of the original version of the song from the movie online, with the more heartily sung covers much more popular on Spotify and YouTube. The film’s songs that are anything other than Harrison recitations fail to do much except reveal how half-baked the Bricusse compositions here are.

In almost every way, the story of Doctor Dolittle’s production, as fastidiously documented in Pictures at a Revolution, is much more exciting than anything on screen. It’s a full-blown Hollywood disaster saga: millions over budget, sets destroyed by weather, animal logistics that spiraled into chaos. The English town of Castle Combe, forced to hide their TV antennas and modern trappings for the shoot, became so annoyed by the production that a young Ranulph Fiennes (the explorer, not the actor) allegedly tried to blow up a concrete dam the studio installed. At one point, producers had to buy a second set of animals because they forgot that the UK’s quarantine laws meant the ones they bought couldn’t be used right away for shooting internationally.

And that’s not even getting into the human drama. Rex Harrison reportedly feuded with nearly everyone, pushing Sammy Davis Jr. off the cast list for not being a “real actor” (gee, I wonder why Fox wanted to cast Davis Jr. in a musical). Harrison, who leveraged tremendous control during pre-production negotiations following the massive success of My Fair Lady, did Fox few favors with erratic demands and behavior. Bricusse was far from the first choice to script the film, and he inadvertently plagiarized the plot point of animals forming a union from Helen Winston’s discarded script draft to which Fox didn’t hold the rights. He had incorrectly assumed it had come from the books he was adapting (which he’d only skimmed). The result was a big lawsuit and payout to Winston. Meanwhile, Harrison sabotaged and phoned in scenes with Anthony Newley, whom he hated at least in part due to antisemitism. Geoffrey Holder endured racism from Harrison’s entourage, which hung around production at Harrison’s insistence. Harrison briefly quit the project, and Fox hired Christopher Plummer; when Harrison returned to the project, Fox was still on the hook for Plummer’s salary even though he didn’t film a single take.

Even after bombing with both critics and audiences (making back barely half of its then-astronomical $17 million budget and recouping little of its investment in merchandising), Doctor Dolittle emerged with nine Academy Award nominations including one win, for “Talk to the Animals.” This is regarded in retrospect (and, according to some quotes in Pictures at a Revolution, in real time) as a case of a studio muscling its sway with Academy voters, probably the most notorious on record until Harvey Weinstein turned Academy manipulation into an art form in the ‘90s. But I can’t really hold it against either Fox or the Academy too much. This kind of voter coaxing has happened since Hollywood started giving itself awards; Doctor Dolittle just represented a particularly egregious and against-consensus example. I suspect it was effective in part because the Academy had the muscle memory of giving this kind of movie lots of awards. In the previous few years alone, both My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, in the same genre as Doctor Dolittle, had won Best Picture and cleaned up on Oscar night. (Harrison even won Best Actor for the former).

Most of this review has been skewering, so let’s pause to remember that the film has its merits. When Doctor Dolittle embraces its identity as a sprawling, roadshow spectacle, it offers a fun, colorful production. Having a menagerie of real animals on screen is a treat. Robert Surtees’ cinematography has received a bad rap in recent years, but I like it. It is lush and painterly, and the sets are mostly wonderful, with a bit of that Mary Poppins Victorian England dollhouse aesthetic. The sea voyage segments, as narratively listless as they are, still look terrific. And the film always keeps its finger on the pulse of the premise, the charm of a world where animals are your partners in mischief for grand adventures. For what it’s worth, and I think it’s not very much, this is also the most book-accurate adaptation of Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle stories aside from the 1928 silhouette animation shorts by Lotte Reiniger.

But also I ask myself: Who should watch this movie? Best Picture nominee completionists will, of course. Aficionados of mid-century bloated musicals might have a good time. Lovers of animal hijinks hoping to soak in the many beasts on screen will get their fill. I just think this film represents a lower-end experience for each of those moviegoing groups. Then again, I understand feeling a pull to a film like this; I even admire it. It has enough idiosyncrasies to stand out in a crooked sort of way: Even when it is not good, Doctor Dolittle is flavorful and peculiar, which goes a long way towards inspiring curiosity. Its combination of high-powered roadshow production, distinct musical recitative style, imagination-sparking premise, tint of psychedelia, and car-crash atonality is truly special. Just not good-special.

(Shout out especially to my podcast co-host Brian who wrote a tribute to the film in 2013 when he ranked it as one of his favorite movies. I admire against-the-grain takes that are well-founded and not simply contrarian, and his love of this film is a great example. It was his selection of the film for discussion on our podcast that’s the reason I ended up watching any of these Dolittle movies in the first place.)

Doctor Dolittle is not a great film, and it’s closer to outright bad than it is to good in my eyes. Where it has enduring value is schadenfreude, if doom-watching is your jam (it is not mine). And even beyond that, it’s a historical artifact: It came out the same year that “New Hollywood” really established itself and reshaped American filmmaking, and is thus a twilight production of a great era of Hollywood musical, informative and fascinating as a comparison point to other films of the time. But like most historical artifacts, it’s ultimately best viewed from a distance.

Here’s the story concocted by Lofting: Doctor John Dolittle is a country physician who starts treating animals, aided by his parrot Polynesia, who teaches him to speak all animal languages. Eventually, his ambitions expand beyond his little English village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. He sails for Africa to cure an epidemic among apes. On his journey, he survives a shipwreck, outwits tyrannical tribesmen, adopts a pushmi-pullyu (two-headed llama), evades pirates, and encounters an abundance of diversions and side characters. The books are short and whimsical, featuring themes of naturalism and colonial adventure. Lofting wrote more than a dozen of them, sometimes told through the eyes of young assistant Tommy Stubbins, sometimes from Dolittle himself, but always with a fondness for his growing menagerie.

The filmed adaptations of Doctor Dolittle’s stories have been surprisingly diverse, reflecting various filmmaking trends and approaches, though they have one thing in common: They are almost universally hated. Worst of the decade-type reputation in some cases. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about several Dolittle adaptations, each with its own peculiar (and often doomed) approach to the talking-animal doctor. If this were Kinemalogue, I’d be calling it “Dolittle Week,” or if I were in a snarky mood, “Please Do Less Week.” We also recently dropped an episode on The Goods: A Film Podcast discussing the 1967 version in depth and reviewing various others.

Some problems the adaptations have faced are predictable: For one, Hugh Lofting operated in the Rudyard Kipling space of English authors who loved writing about just how uncivilized the fringes of his monarch’s empire were. This informed many of his stories that involved Dr. Dolittle going out into some wild exotic place, including Africa, and encountering “savages.” Thus, many of his stories are filled with racism and caricature. Plots use white-savior tropes, and Lofting’s prose frequently deploys slurs. The occasional illustrations are the kind you’d find today in a museum exhibit on colonial propaganda. Later editions scrubbed or revised some of the most egregious material, but the DNA remains. Any faithful adaptation of these books will inevitably confront the question of how to handle representation of colonial subjects and indigenous people.

Also, as much as the concept of a kooky vet who can talk with animals makes for an intriguing setup and premise, it does not naturally lead into large-scale narratives. The books themselves are loose and episodic, full of detours and self-contained shenanigans. It’s little surprise to me that the two highest-rated adaptations of Doctor Dolittle (per IMDb) are animated TV shows that support case-of-the-week storytelling. One of these is the 1970 TV series co-created by Looney Tunes great Fritz Freleng and produced by 20th Century Fox. The other is a 1984 Japanese cartoon (with English-language voice acting).

But among filmed adaptations, the most faithful to the source is probably the very first, a piece of silhouette animation by German animator Lotte Reiniger. She is best known as the creator of The Adventures of Prince Achmed from 1926, the earliest surviving animated feature film. That film is a terrific execution of an old-fashioned form of animation: paper-cut silhouettes, often constructed with multiple layers to create a sense of visual shading and depth. Though Prince Achmed is Reiniger’s most famous work, she was a prolific animator: she released nearly 70 films over her career, most of them short-form adaptations of fables, operas, and fairy tales in that silhouette animation style. Her “Dr. Dolittle und seine Tiere” aka “Doctor Dolittle and His Animals” is both a continuation of that approach and a curio within it: an engagement with contemporary material, not Reiniger’s usual subject matter.

I use the word “probably” in describing this Dolittle adaptation in part because it is difficult to say with clarity what it actually is and when it was made. I confess I haven’t managed to get to the bottom of it, as I’ve found conflicting sources online. I’m most inclined to trust the 2017 biography of Reiniger written by Whitney Grace, but I can only read small snippets of it at a time via its Google Books page. (I’m not shelling out $30+ for a copy, and my library does not have it in stock.) The portions I read from the bio suggest that the Dolittle episodes were animated by Reiniger between September 1927 and April 1928, and most movie databases apply a 1928 release date. An article in Animation World Network Magazine by William Moritz about Reiniger’s career lists a premiere of her Dolittle film in Berlin of December 15, 1928, which aligns with this.

Where it gets cloudy is on The Criterion Channel, which has a robust set of Reiniger films and is the only non-bootleg streaming service with this film. Based on the production company logos when streaming from Criterion Channel, their copies of the Dolittle shorts seem to be the ones included as bonus features on the Blu-ray release of The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Milestone Films and Kino Lorber. Oddly, both Criterion and the Milestone/Kino Lorber Blu-ray list the Dolittle film as being from 1923 rather than 1928. I assume Criterion pulled this year from Milestone. I haven’t seen 1923 used as a production or release date anywhere else, but it’s not impossible Reiniger’s Dolittle film existed in some embryonic form then. One piece of evidence that could support this is that the animation here is much simpler than the work in Prince Achmed, which might suggest an earlier stage in Reiniger’s craft. But more likely, the simpler style was a pragmatic and stylistic choice. The Dolittle shorts were aimed at kids, produced much faster and less painstakingly than Prince Achmed was, and not intended for art-house moviegoers. I’m inclined to trust the 1928 release consensus of all sources except Criterion and Milestone on this one.

Then there’s the matter of what the format and duration of the film is. Almost universally, the agreement seems to be that the film is composed of three sequential episodes totaling about 30–35 minutes. I’ve seen no concrete reporting on whether the shorts were initially screened together or shown piecemeal. The only source that defies this 30-35 minute consensus is Moritz in AWN Magazine, who calls “Dr. Dolittle und seine Tiere” a feature-length project totaling 65 minutes. If that’s true, there’s zero evidence of where the missing 30-ish minutes went. Moritz does note that later TV versions (including a TV broadcast with added voiceover) sped up the silent footage, which might explain a few minutes’ difference, but not half the runtime. Did Reiniger animate footage that’s now lost? Or was Moritz simply mistaken? (The latter seems likely.) Interestingly, Reiniger herself suggested in her book Shadow Puppets, Shadow Theatres, and Shadow Film that Dolittle’s stories were best suited to 10–15 minute silhouette plays aimed at children. That would seem to argue for short-form episodes.

The last matter of confusion is whether the film is “unfinished.” The third and final episode concludes at the end of Lofting’s first book, The Story of Doctor Dolittle, so it seems like a natural stopping point. Grace’s biography of Reiniger claims the shorts end on a “cliffhanger,” but that’s not the version I watched. (Unless you count Dolittle wistfully looking off into a sunset as a cliffhanger.) A German animation fan site says Reiniger never got the funding to continue her vision of expanding her adaptation of the Dolittle novels, which makes sense to me, but that claim doesn’t appear in the Grace excerpts I could find. My read: Reiniger, who knew Lofting personally according to the linked site, adapted the first book in full, and had ambitions to do more but was ultimately stymied by the usual suspects: money and time. That’s not so much an “unfinished” film as an “unrealized sequel” situation.

Regardless, it seems that the Düsseldorf Film Museum has copies of the films, and probably answers to some of the questions I posed above. The museum catalog, accessible online, lists numerous entries related to the film, but even aside the language barrier it’s hard to parse the metadata to get any concrete answers.

So I watched the first and third episodes on Criterion Channel, but the streaming service is missing the second episode without any explanation. Maybe that’s an intentional omission: the second short is the one that contains the most overtly racist imagery, portraying a group of indigenous African “cannibals” as grotesque Black savage caricatures who imprison Dolittle and his animals. But YouTube currently hosts the TV edit of the second episode (sans intertitles). Thus, as far as I can tell, I’ve seen the entirety of Reiniger’s adaptation in some form.

With all that background: What’s actually here? Reiniger’s film is a charming and visually clever adaptation of the Doctor Dolittle origin story, rendered in Reiniger’s trademark style. We meet the rotund Doctor in Puddleby, see him learn to speak animal languages, watch him set sail for Africa with his menagerie, and follow him through a series of gentle misadventures: a trip to Africa to aid some sick monkeys, getting captured by “cannibals,” and plucking a thorn from the foot of a lion. No pushmi-pullyu, sadly. The film wraps up with Dolittle in Africa having helped some animals, smiling serenely as the camera fades: mission accomplished.

The animation is, unsurprisingly, delightful. Reiniger’s silhouettes remain expressive and fluid, and her ability to conjure action and emotion from simple shapes is as well-formed here as in Prince Achmed. That said, the production feels pared down. Gone are the color tints and suggestion of depth with layered silhouette arrangements; many scenes play out in a single, flat silhouette against a white background. It fits the lighter, less mythic tone of the Dolittle material, but I was hoping for a bit more visual flourish.

But one major piece is missing: voice. Maybe it’s because this is a silent film, but this is the only adaptation I’ve seen that doesn’t make a point of dramatizing Dolittle’s ability to communicate with animals. In the books, and nearly every other adaptation, this is the main point, of course. It’s the source of the comedy, wonder, and chaos. Here, we just see him nodding and gesturing at his loyal animal companions, and they respond in kind. The concept is implied, I suppose, but the absence of any communication makes the magic a bit more abstract. To be fair, Dolittle’s ability to understand animals is nonverbal in the source books, and rendered as such in the 1967 adaptation (whereas most later adaptations use voiceover when animals “talk”). But Dolittle conversing with animals in one form or another is always there, except for this one.

So here it is: the first and most attractive adaptation of Doctor Dolittle. It’s brisk and hews closely to the core arc of Lofting’s novel (racist ickiness and all). Watching it, it’s easy to detect ideas explored in the (too) many future adaptations, a barely extant little sprout of a film. It’s a bit of a shame it’s slipped through the fingers of film history. Reiniger’s film deserves to be remembered not only as a historical artifact, but as a charming piece of animation.

But seen today, Lotte Reiniger’s Dr. Dolittle und seine Tiere is both too slight and too marred with the baggage of the story to count as a hidden gem. Even still, there’s a case to be made it’s the best theatrically released or feature length adaptation of Doctor Dolittle ever produced. (I have another pick, but this one is probably second place for me.) That’s not a high bar, but that’s the nature of Dolittle adaptations.