You’ve got to hand it to those poor computer animation studios at companies not named Pixar; if Apple is the small upstart in the battle for personal computers, Steve Jobs’s other “little company that could” has easily become the Microsoft of computer-animated films. Anyone else who tries to make competing product is in for one heck of an uphill battle.

Not that the competition always puts its best foot forward. I have to confess I have yet to be interested in a CGI film from Fox (“Robots” just looked obnoxious), and it’s more than a little suspect that Dreamworks released “Antz” and “Shark Tale” in such close proximity to the similarly-themed “A Bug’s Life” and “Finding Nemo.” The one sure hit that Pixar hasn’t been responsible for has been the Shrek series, which seems to have become the Dreamworks model for animated storytelling. This strategy has both its advantages and flaws.

“Madagascar” is about a group of zoo animals that escape from the confines of their simulated habitat in the name of wanderlust and adventure. But these aren’t your ordinary zoo animals, they’re New York zoo animals, complete with their rah-rah New Yorker attitudes (I think at one point an animated hippo actually declares something like, “We’re New Yorkers, right? We’re tough!”). The story focuses on four main characters: Alex the lion (voiced by Ben Stiller), Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer) and Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith) the aforementioned hippo heroine. Rounding out the escapees are a well-trained squad of penguins and a pair of monkeys — one much more sophisticated than the other, but neither above throwing feces when the urge arises.

The animals are all recaptured and shipped overseas, but events (and screenwriters) being what they are, the animals come to find themselves marooned in Madagascar where they befriend a strange colony of lemurs. In the process, the central friendship between Alex and Marty is tested as Marty rediscovers his predatory instincts in the wild and must resist the age-old temptation to eat his friends.

Like most animated fare, the film mines lots of jokes from the simple fact of anthropomorphizing its main characters — Look, a giraffe complaining about HMOs! A lion grousing about the Knicks! — but there’s a certain carefree edge to the humor that gives the film a refreshing sense of grown-up realism. It’s oddly comforting to see a cartoon version of Times Square that includes all the crass advertisements, and despite a slapstick sense of physics and cute character designs the film manages to play its un-Disney-like qualities as a strength.

The one habit I do wish Dreamworks would kick is its penchant for pop culture references, first demonstrated (and beaten to death) in “Shrek”; these people literally live and die by the homage. “Saturday Night Fever,” “Planet of the Apes,” “National Geographic” and others all get their earnest send-ups in “Madagascar,” and there’s even a direct reference to “American Beauty” complete with Thomas Newman score that I found both bold and ridiculous. It’s not the idea that these references are corny or quickly dated that bothers me — it’s the implied admission by the filmmakers that the cinematic world they’ve created is insufficient alone to entertain an audience. Cultural context be damned — when did straight parody become homage, and when did homage become a substitute for originality?

As movies go, though, I actually found myself pleasantly entertained by “Madagascar.” It certainly doesn’t leave you with much to think about or engender any long-term feelings, but there’s a surprising craft to its construction that makes you think that in due time Pixar might not have that monopoly sealed up after all.