Tomorrowland: A World Beyond (Brad Bird, 2015)

Here, director Bird continues with live action instead of the animation with which he made his name, albeit that it's cartoonish and CGI-laden enough that it might as well dispense with physical actors. The premise of a very child-oriented story is basically that there is another futuristic world that the young and spirited have access to through contact with magic pins, and a feisty teenage girl becomes determined to get there again after her first exposure to it. George Clooney turns up as a disillusioned man expelled from Tomorrowland as a child, playing a kind of substitute father figure who trots out the moral of the story, which is in essence a very middle-of-the-road woolly Disney philosophy about the value of hope and positivity in the face of the mess that the adult world is. Bird is a competent enough hand at the helm to ensure that it zips along lightly for the most part, but it's vexing to discover that there's far less substance and emotional complexity here for the adult audience than what any of his animated works contained.

5/10