A pair of heroines on opposite sides of the world team up in “Nim’s Island,” an eye-dazzling and heart-warming story from Walden Media, the latest in its series of fine films based on popular children’s literature.

Nim (Abigail Breslin, “Little Miss Sunshine”), who’s 11, and her marine biologist father, Jack (Gerard Butler), are the only human residents of a remote but idyllic South Pacific island. While Jack studies nanoplankton, Nim makes the entire island her school, with the animals as her teachers and her friends.

Every few months, a supply boat brings another book by her favorite author, Alex Rover, an international man of adventure. But Alex is really Alexandra (Jodie Foster), a writer so terrified of just about everything that she lives on canned soup, constantly sanitizes her hands and cannot get far enough outside her front door to retrieve the mail.

Alexandra has created a hero who is everything she is not – fearless and always eager to go where she has never been and try what she has never tried.

To get information for her new book, Alexandra e-mails Jack for details about a volcano he described in an article for National Geographic. But he is away for two days, obtaining plankton samples, so Nim answers, thinking she is corresponding with the dashing Alex (also played by Butler, as envisioned by both Alexandra and Nim). By the time Alexandra realizes she is writing to a child, Jack is now missing and Nim is alone on the island. And the woman who was terrified to walk four feet to the mailbox must go halfway around the world to help her new friend. Husband and wife directors Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin seamlessly combine adventure, drama, comedy and fantasy as Jack, Nim and Alexandra confront their separate but often parallel fears and challenges. As Nim tightens the rope around her waist so that she can climb the volcano, Alexandra is tightening the belt of her robe and gathering her resolve to walk out the front door. All three find their determination tested and creativity challenged. And all find assistance from unexpected friends.

Nim is an enormously appealing heroine and it is especially welcome to have a story about a resourceful and courageous young girl. The film wisely makes her the center of the story in a way that young audiences will find empowering. Breslin’s unaffected interactions with the island creatures and natural screen presence are a pleasure to watch.

Of the three characters, Nim is closest to the imaginary Alex Rover, confident and capable. She navigates the island by gliding on zip wires like a modern-day Tarzan. She not only swims with a sea lion, she also teaches it to play soccer and boogie. She can fix the solar panels on the roof to get the electricity and satellite uplink back in working order, protect the newborn baby turtles from predators, rappel down the side of a volcano, and make a dinner out of mung beans and meal worms.

When the island is invaded by a pirate-themed cruise ship bearing pina coladas, beach chairs and chubby Australian tourists, Nim and her animal friends set up a “Home Alone”-style series of booby-traps to scare them away.

Butler is fine as Nim’s fond, if distracted father and as the heroic Alex.

It’s a treat to see Foster enjoying a comic turn in her first family film since her Disney days, when she was Nim’s age, and shared the screen with Helen Hayes in “Candleshoe.” Here’s hoping when it is time for Breslin to pass on the torch to a young actress 30 years from now, it will be in a movie as good as this one.

Nim's Island is the sort of movie where people fall off boats in the middle of typhoons and wake up perfectly fine on the shores of deserted South Pacific islands.

This, by itself, is not a mortal sin -- more of a venial sin along the lines of explosions that can't hurt you as long as you're running away from them. Which reminds me, Nim's Island also has a volcanic eruption you can run away from.

Those are just two contrivances in a children's movie that is larded with them. The worst movie of Jodie Foster's adult career, Nim's Island is as big a mess as you might expect from a movie with four credited writers (which means there were probably more) and two directors, all at apparent cross-purposes.

That leaves a lot on the 11-year-old shoulders of the ubiquitous Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine, Definitely, Maybe), whose now-famous toothy grin looks absolutely genuine as she rappels through the jungle and talks to the animals (a sea lion, a pelican and a bearded dragon lizard), all of whom talk back in their own fashion and play and dance with her as if she were Bindi The Jungle Girl.

Depending on your insulin level, these are Nim's Island's best moments. The rest will bore kids of all ages.

The movie begins with Nim (Breslin) narrating her own life story, which includes her oceanographer mother's death at the hands of a hungry blue whale (the average 7-year-old could tell you blue whales are baleen mammals who couldn't ingest anything much bigger than a shrimp). Time has passed, and she now shares an island paradise with her biologist dad (Gerard Butler), and when not cruising on the back of her sea lion, she immerses herself in the potboiler novel adventures of Alex Rover, an Indiana Jones-esque character played by Butler.

On the other side of the planet, we meet Alexandra Rover (Foster), a neurotic shut-in, paralyzed by agoraphobia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The author of the Alex Rover books, she's routinely visited by her creation (again, played by Butler), who mocks her for never leaving the house. Foster is supposed to play all this for laughs, and she's so stiff you can see why she hasn't done a comedy since, I believe, Freaky Friday.

While researching her next book, she comes across a magazine article Nim's dad wrote about living in the shadow of a volcano and e-mails him with lava questions (apparently she's more interested in accuracy than the writers of this movie). Unfortunately, the professor is stranded at sea looking for glow-in-the-dark protozoa, and Nim injures herself studying the volcano at Alexandra's behest.

Realizing there's a child in danger in the South Pacific, and egged on by her protagonist, Alexandra forces herself to leave the house and fly around the world. This wacky flibbertigibbet's Third World journey is not exactly in Foster's acting wheelhouse, and we have to endure a lot of it. It comes off as an entirely pointless slapstick exercise, since Nim can clearly take care of herself and has no use for a neurotic city woman. Nor does Alexandra's mission hold out any hope for the missing dad.

Not to worry, of course. Nim's Island is a movie about "peril" that is practically devoid of suspense. You won't have to worry about your kids being frightened, though a non-scheduled nap remains a possibility.