At some point during its troubled gestation, the movie once known as “The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle” was renamed “Dolittle.” Was “voyage” too fusty, “doctor” too fancy?

Whatever the case, it’s too bad that the rest of this movie couldn’t have been ditched as well, or at least dramatically shortened. A dreary, overextended yawn, this is the latest movie to feature John Dolittle, the doctor turned horse whisperer that Hugh Lofting, a British-born civil engineer, invented during World War I in letters to his children from the front. (He also drew the illustrations.)

Robert Downey Jr., working an indistinct accent (Welsh? Scottish?), stars as Dolittle, now a recluse, who in the wake of a tragedy has retreated to his manor in Victorian England. There, he lives with a computer-generated menagerie voiced by an army of actors who include Tom Holland (as a pacific dog), Octavia Spencer (an excitable duck) and Emma Thompson as Poly, a bright blue parrot with a battered beak. Poly spends a lot of time gently yet firmly bossing Dolittle around like a cliché of a wife, an interspecies dynamic that’s lightly amusing (and weird) to think about when things slow down. Dolittle’s wife died a while ago, as women often do in movies for children.