Distilling movie magic from popular fantasy literature isn't easy. The "Lord of the Rings" films did it brilliantly; "The Golden Compass" failed laughably; and now "Inkheart" makes the attempt, with considerable success, in bringing Cornelia Funke's international best-seller of the same name to the screen.

The story is likely to captivate anyone, of any age, who loves books. It concerns a "Silvertongue" named Mortimer, or Mo, who has the ability to draw characters out of the books they inhabit and into the real world. The drawback is that real-world people can get sucked into those same books at the same time, and disappear. This is what happened to Mo's wife, Resa, when he was reading to her from a book called "Inkheart" — and simultaneously unleashed into the world the book's evil villain, Capricorn. Ever since then, Mo, an itinerant bookbinder, has moved restlessly around Europe with his daughter, Meggie, now 12, in flight from Capricorn and in search of another copy of "Inkheart" from which to rescue Resa. Capricorn wants Mo to find a new "Inkheart," too: not because he wants to return to its pages — he's quite happy having been set loose in human society — but because he wants Mo to summon from its pages a fearsome monster called the Shadow to do his nefarious bidding.

The English director Iain Softley ("The Wings of the Dove"), working from a script by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire ("Rabbit Hole"), has created a lush fantasy world filled with memorably eccentric characters and rich environments — quaint cobbly villages, gleaming Alpine panoramas — that lend the picture a unique visual texture. Brendan Fraser plays Mo with a minimum of the hokey bravado he deploys in the "Mummy" movies; Andy Serkis brings scenery-gobbling panache to the role of Capricorn; and teen actress Eliza Hope Bennett, in her first lead film role, gamely holds her own as Meggie, scurrying through a procession of alarming attacks, great escapes and weird creature encounters. Tagging along throughout are Dustfinger (Paul Bettany), another character summoned out of "Inkheart," who wants only to be returned to his fictional world and his wife (a cameo by Bettany's own spouse, Jennifer Connelly), and Mo's Aunt Elinor (Helen Mirren), a crotchety bookworm. Stir in a young thief named Farid (Rafi Gavron), freshly plucked from the "Arabian Nights," and a fantastical menagerie of Minotaurs, water nymphs, flying monkeys (from "The Wizard of Oz") and a tick-tocking crocodile (from "Peter Pan"), and you have a movie that's at the very least lively, and sometimes enchanting.

There are flat spots. The Shadow, when he finally puts in a stormy appearance, is a little too Balrog to be entirely surprising. And the film's frantic conclusion goes on too long. But Capricorn's comical henchman (in escaping from "Inkheart," they've accumulated smudges of prose on their faces) are cleverly individualized, and go about their dastardly doings with fine mock-sinister flair. There are some resonant emotional moments, too. At one point, for example, Dustfinger confronts "Inkheart" author Fenoglio (Jim Broadbent), who informs him that at the end of the book, he must die. Dustfinger responds with rebellious anger: "You don't control my fate," he fumes. "I'm not just a character in some book, and you are not my God." Very ... human, actually.

Like the book from which it's drawn, "Inkheart" the movie is nominally children's entertainment. But the story has a vivid originality, and Roger Pratt's cinematography — especially when the action moves into the hills and shores of the Italian Riviera — is ravishing beyond the call of demographics. Any grown-ups deputized to accompany kids to this picture should find the usual watch-checking squirm factor to be surprisingly minimal.

Don't miss Kurt Loder's reviews of "Donkey Punch" and "The Lodger," also new in theaters this week.

Check out everything we've got on "Inkheart."

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