The NeverEnding Story had a real boy enter an unreal world and for most of the movie we see the fantasy milieu.

Bridge to Terabithia, though, is not a special effects movie. However, the few effects in it are in spite of the prominent publicity surrounding Weta Digital, who mastered the visual effects in it, and who won Oscars for The Lord of the Rings and King Kong.

The lack of visual surprise should be obvious to anyone familiar with the source material, which I wasn’t. How many visual scenes could you fill in a novel, anyhow, with the exception of Tolkien’s masterpiece and a raft of fantasy novels in your local bookstore?

The American author, Katherine Paterson, says on her website that she wrote the children’s book, released in 1977, because her “son David's best friend, an eight-year-old named Lisa Hill, was struck and killed by lightning.

“I wrote the book to try to make sense out of a tragedy that seemed senseless.”

What happens in the movie is that we witness a slice of life, filmed in West Auckland, New Zealand, in a distinctly rural area covering for America.

Jess (Josh Hutcherson) and Leslie (Anna Sophia Robb) are in elementary school, obviously a bit older in the grade. They’re picked on and have various issues going on at home as well. Both develop a friendship and she introduces the boy to an imaginary world.

In the movie version, it is unclear why she is so motivated by having this imaginary life, so it weakens the narrative. The boy’s life is more detailed and it appears he’s escaping the realities of his life.

It contains shifting perspectives on the issues, such as abuse, death, responsibility, the afterlife and the fear of eternal punishment, complicating the theme, making for a grown-up family movie.

Taken as a whole, it works. The metaphor of the land of Terabithia requires a little thought, but the reward is positive: author Paterson said, “I am Christian, so that conviction will pervade the book even when I make no conscious effort to teach or preach.