Imaginative ‘Nim’ succeeds

By Dan Moore

Published April 11, 2008

It’s best to get this out right now: “Nim’s Island” requires a ton of suspension of disbelief, and not the kind (pop culture-referencing ogres, Martin Lawrence reproducing) that we as an audience have grown used to.

Ostensibly, a movie that takes place in our world, it nevertheless features animals capable of plotting “Home Alone” traps for evil cruise-runners, a girl who is happily sequestered on a deserted island and home schooled without anyone but her father for company and a big, gorgeous island that has somehow gone undiscovered despite regular Internet usage in the islanders’ Swiss Family Robinsonian house. People over the age of 12 who don’t already enjoy “Lost” might have trouble dealing with these improbabilities, but as a children’s movie “Nim” succeeds anyway.

“Nim” is about two characters who, for the most part, are alone in the world. As mentioned before, Nim lives alone on an island with her father, talking to animals and reading incessantly in lieu of human contact. Alex Rover (Jodie Foster, in a surprisingly thorough comic turn) is an agoraphobic author who writes Nim’s favorite books, a faux-memoir series about an Indiana Jones type named Alex Rover. When Nim’s father goes missing at sea she begins e-mailing one Alex Rover about it, hoping for the action hero, and our agoraphobic hero packs all the bottles of hand sanitizer she can find and heads, reluctantly, for the South Pacific.

Welcome surprise number one: “Nim”’s characters have rich internal lives, a kid’s movie rarity. Typically imagination plays itself out as a nothing more than a buzzword, but this film goes a step further, actually showing its effects. Alex the author spends much of her time being goaded into action by Alex the action hero, who walks around her apartment quoting lines from her books. Meanwhile, Nim is actually given the easy excitability of young children, able to spin at will any situation into one filled with danger and intrigue.

Like most children’s movies that aren’t terrible, “Nim” eschews the “Shrek”-ian pop-culture reference and veiled sex joke in favor of using legitimately charming characters placed into empathetic situations. In addition to the flights of fancy it takes when the fictional adventurer is on screen — and most impressively for a movie about a girl lost on an island and an author who can’t leave her apartment — the film is not averse to the occasional well-directed action sequence.

This is not a film without flaw; some of the hokey-ness with the animals and other moments of disbelief will be too much for even a small child to stomach, and when the action cuts to the lost father it introduces some superfluous, tone-deaf subplots. But this is an enjoyable film, filled with understated, funny characters, and when Nim and Alex finally get through their parallel adventures and find each other, it proves both welcome and well-earned.