BY TASHA ROBINSON | Chicago Tribune

Over the past five years, Walden Media has become a reliable purveyor of big, bright family fantasies from "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" to "Charlotte's Web." But there have been missteps along the way. (Remember "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium?")

Walden's latest, "Nim's Island," veers close to the negative side of the tally sheet. The premise, from a 2002 book by Wendy Orr, is terrific, but the execution seems designed to make all but the youngest viewers fling copies of her book at the screen in frustration.


Abigail Breslin ("Little Miss Sunshine") stars as Nim, a smart, independent 11-year-old who lives with her microbiologist dad Jack (Gerard Butler, "300") on an uncharted South Pacific island. As she explains in an interminable opening monologue, she has a life most kids would envy: no school, a bevy of tame animal friends and a whole island to herself.

Then Jack is caught in a storm and lost at sea. For help, Nim turns to her favorite author, Alex Rover (also played by Butler), an Indiana Jones-type whose books about his rough-and-tumble adventures are international bestsellers. But Nim is unaware that the real Alex is Alexandra Rover, an agoraphobic San Francisco fiction writer played by Jodie Foster. Nim's e-mail pleas for rescue set off a crisis for Alexandra - she can't make it to the end of her own sidewalk to pick up her mail, yet she feels obligated to travel around the world to help.

It's a fun story, particularly in its playful, creative sense of the relationship between fiction and reality. But clunky, overwrought performances make the film's "real world" less compelling than its fantasy side. It's painful to see an actor of Foster's caliber flailing, bellowing and performing Rob Schneider pratfalls.

Repetitive product placement is an ongoing distraction. More problematically, the characters narrate themselves, describing their intentions and feelings as if viewers can't be trusted to grasp that Nim is crying because she's sad. Which makes "Nim's Island" accessible to small children, but older kids and parents may feel patronized, and all the explanations put brakes on what should be a fleet, exciting story.

But for all its limitations, the film still looks terrific. Flawless CGI and forays into animation keep things visually lively, and Nim's enviable life is likely to hook kids into the story early.

The film touches on the differences between fantasy and reality, but it's most appealing in its fantasy elements. And, it envisions a place kids will want to return to in their own adventure stories, long after this somewhat flawed one is over.