See Spot run. See Spot talk. See Spot get zapped by a DNA ray gun that transforms him into a hairy human bachelor who wears lederhosen and hits on your mother.

Looks like someone's been huffing spray enamel.

Based on Disney's Emmy Award- winning cable TV series, ‘‘Teacher's Pet’’ is distilled from the same hallucinogenic kiddie mash that once gave us ‘‘H.R. Pufnstuf’’ and spawned current child-oriented oddities such as ‘‘SpongeBob SquarePants.’’ Crudely if uniquely animated, it has at least one thing going for it as a family movie: Your kids are probably too naive
to grasp how blisteringly bizarre it really is.

Most of all, ‘‘Teacher's Pet’’ is a story of denial. Talking house dog Spot — voiced by Nathan Lane (‘‘The Birdcage’’) — wants desperately to be a real boy, so much so that he dons eyeglasses, tucks his floppy ears under a cap and attends school every day alongside his beloved owner, Leonard Helperman (Shaun Fleming), a fourth-grade boy who keeps Spot's double
life a secret.

More than anything, Leonard wants Spot to give up the deception and be at peace with his dog identity: fetching sticks, rolling over, etc. It's a doozy of a co-dependent malaise, punctuated with catchy cartoon song-and-dance numbers with titles such as ‘‘A Boy Needs a Dog’’ and the Pinocchio-esque ‘‘I Wanna Be a Boy.’’

Finally, Spot gets his shot at boyhood, enlisting the odious services of a mad Miami-based geneticist (Kelsey Grammer) who is more interested in personal glory than the well-being of his patients. Instead of turning into a boy, Spot becomes a man (remember the dog-years conversion table), which inevitably changes the pale of his relationship with Leonard, especially when Leonard's mom (Debra Jo Rupp from ‘‘That 70s Show’’) develops amorous feelings for this hirsute, oddly familiar stranger.

Let's not even speculate how executive producers and co-writers Bill and Cheri Steinkellner (‘‘Cheers’’) came up with that particular plot twist — it will suffice to point out that the movie's erratic, cheeky wit fails to sustain the story after the first hour or so, when it simply becomes tiresome.

The animation, based on the work of illustrator Gary Baseman, is amusing in a pinched, abstract sort of way, but hardly awe-inspiring. ‘‘Teacher's Pet’’ is, after all, merely a cartoon, not to be lumped in with the ‘‘Finding Nemos’’ and ‘‘Lion Kings’’ of the world.