Tony Hale to Star in Spielberg's Teen Adventure

If you took the stunned wonder of Steven Spielberg, the mischievous mischief of Joe Dante, plus the vibrant visuals of top-notch Pixar and somehow blended them together in a Magic Bullet blender, the resulting concoction might very well look like Sketcha boldly gonzo debut from Seth Worley.

While the teen tale may certainly lack originality, it more than makes up for any borrowed bits with a sugary-sweet live-action comedy, featuring an unusual take on family therapy in which a 10-year-old girl's grief manifests itself in violent drawings that come to life.

Working with a vibrant and engaging cast and talented visual effects crew, Worley, a visual effects enthusiast whose previous directing work has focused primarily on corporate videos, delivers a film that is hard to resist, will appeal to audiences of all ages, and looks set to gain distribution soon after its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Struggling with day-to-day life after the death of his wife, well-meaning but disoriented father Taylor Wyatt (a perfectly cast Tony Hale) and his children, Amber (Bianca Belle) and Jack (Kue Lawrence), each have their own ways of dealing with the loss.

While the males in the family tend to repress their unexpressed grief, Amber wears her art on her sleeve, drawing monsters exacting grisly revenge on a troublesome classmate. They alarm her teachers but receive encouragement from a therapist who gives her a composition notebook to safely work through her anger issues.

Meanwhile, the more introverted Jack, who has stumbled upon a mysterious pond in the woods with a proven ability to repair damaged objects, wonders what effect those healing powers might have on his mother's scattered ashes.

Just when she's about to put her theory into practice, Amber's notebook accidentally ends up in the murky water and before you know it Babadooka torrent of sick and twisted creations springs to life, wreaking havoc on everything in its path.

While Amber, Jack and the loquacious Bowman (Kalon Cox), the original object of Amber's ire, join forces to fend off their adversaries, their unsuspecting father, whose real estate agent sister (D'Arcy Carden) is in possession of the listing for their house, is concerned only with getting the house in order.

While Worley said that from the beginning the field for Sketch was “Inside and out meet Jurassic Park,” but one cannot help but also notice elements of The Goonies, Gremlins, Goosebumps, Stranger things AND Where the wild things live added for good measure.

All this derivation might have been a glaring disadvantage in less experienced hands, but Worley has skillfully assembled the mega-mash-up into an engaging whole, with the help of a lovable cast and a first-rate technical team.

Hale smooths out the edges of his more neurotic side Arrested development AND Vice President characters to play the anchor role of a perfectly average father just trying to figure out the right path for his traumatized family. It's relative calm in a swirling sea of ​​chaos.

This chaos is calibrated for maximum audacity thanks to CGI judiciously incorporated by visual effects supervisor Dan Sturm, who doesn't skimp on the wow factor and is further amplified by composer Cody Fry's cacophonous, turbulent score.

Sure, the film could have kept the breathless, pop-culture-infused banter between the kids to a more moderate level, and Worley is guilty of leaning a little too heavily on the dead-mom trope. But the end result still packs a punch.

Grief has never been processed with such astonishing ease.