Nim’s Island is a throwback to the children’s movies that dominated the pre-Pixar era. While it may take place in the present day, the movie presents a fantasy world that’s completely divorced from our own. While that’s certainly a fine avenue to pursue in a kid's film, it can be really hard to sit through when presented with nauseating sincerity in an age of irony.

The film stars Abigail Breslin as Nim, a young girl who has been raised by her father on a deserted tropical island. One day, her dad makes the finest parenting decision of his life and leaves Nim alone on the island while he goes on a research expedition at sea. Obviously, disaster strikes and he’s left in the middle of the ocean without a sail. Out of desperation, Nim reaches out to Alex Rover, her favourite adventure novelist, for help. Rover (played by Jodi Foster) turns out to be a middle-aged bundle of neuroses who hasn’t even left her house in months. The rest of Nim's Island feels like two different films awkwardly sandwiched together as father and daughter struggle to reunite, while Rover attempts to overcome her bag of phobias to help a girl she’s never met. It's sloppy writing pure and simple, with no plot contrivance or cliché unpursued and endless sequences of characters talking to themselves.

The filmmakers and actors almost seem conscious of the bad script and are constantly trying to overcompensate. Foster does a reasonable job of finding the right level of manic for her character, but everyone else in the cast struggles to bring their cartoon caricatures to life and helplessly mug for the camera. The directing team of Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin do everything they can to keep the story interesting and fill the movie with pointless animation and visual gags (like an email POV shot that travels across the globe) to fill the void. Nim’s Island has the visual panache of a movie has been carefully thought out by a team of talented visual storytellers — it’s just a shame that they had no interesting story to tell.