“‘Schindler’s List’ With Pets”: That’s my suggested alternate title for “The Zookeeper’s Wife.” This mild-mannered Holocaust film probably wasn’t conceived as family fare but is so timid and sanitized it almost feels safe for children.

Except for its scenes involving animals, this handsome, excessively fastidious screen adaptation of Diane Ackerman’s 2007 nonfiction best seller is a polite but pallid recycling of Holocaust movie tropes with epic pretensions. The book tells the true story of a Polish couple who rescued about 300 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust and sheltered them in their zoo.

What does it say that the most stirring scenes in a movie that avoids graphic depictions of Nazi barbarism involve the heroic title character, Antonina Zabinska (Jessica Chastain), lovingly interacting with the animals in the Warsaw Zoo, which she runs with her husband, Jan (Johan Heldenbergh)?

In these tender moments, “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” directed by Niki Caro (“Whale Rider”), from an anemic screenplay by Angela Workman, shucks off its modesty and transforms into the sentimental portrait of a beautiful woman and the animals she cares for like a devoted parent. You can trust animals, but not people, she declares.