Most animated features are designed to be exported to countries all over the world, the voice track redubbed for each local market to add flavour and ensure the kids don’t have to read subtitles. Likewise, having the characters incarnated by talking animals (a tradition dating back to the earliest days of animation), is another handy way to deracialise the material. This way, anyone anywhere watching the same movie can relate to the heroic dog or rabbit or whoever as they go about learning about the value of family or the importance of friendship in a fantasy landscape that bears little resemblance to our actual planet.

This one, apparently a multinational effort judging by its end credits and production companies, weirdly both conforms to and breaks those rules. Yes, all the characters in it are non-human animals, starting with the slow loris hero, Zhi (voiced by Jimmy O Yang) who longs to be a race-car driver despite resistance from his grandmother guardian (Lisa Lu) – she would prefer him to spend all day learning tai chi. The baddie is a frog racer named Archie Vainglorious (John Cleese, sounding husky these days), the key helper a goat named Gnash (JK Simmons, doing a very weird American-Swedish accent), and the love interest is another slow loris named Shelby (Chloe Bennet).

So far, so traditionally anthropomorphic. But at the same time, there’s lots of discussion of Chinese and Asian heritage, what with the big race Zhi competes in being called the Silk Road Rally, a wacky race that ends in a cartoon facsimile of Shanghai. Elsewhere we have pregnant male seahorses with Italian accents, and some kind of weasel creature with a cockney accent who, when they’re trying to help Zhi beat Vainglorious, pulls a lever inside their vehicle labelled “Brexit” that releases, pointlessly, an avalanche of teapots to thwart those behind there vehicle.

That last bit was one of the better jokes, while the other chuckles are mostly delivered via the patter from one of the peripheral characters, an Icelandic reindeer voiced by Catherine Tate. There’s also a well-drawn but narratively inexplicable spoof of the Norwegian band a-ha’s classic Take on Me video, although it’s doubtful any of the younger viewers will get the reference. This is very bizarre stuff, even within the traditionally weird parameters of cultural representation in cartoons, but kids won’t mind as it’s one non-stop riot of colour and vroom-vroom movement.

• This article was amended on 16 September 2023. The band a-ha are from Norway, not Sweden as an earlier version said.

• Rally Road Racers is released on 15 September in UK and Irish cinemas.