Kids who grew up with these books finally see Jack and Annie move the way they imagined. The tree house portal logic works because the movie trusts the simple magic, a book, a wish, a jump into somewhere else. It doesn't waste time explaining why time travel happens; it just lets you travel. The medallion hunt gives structure without pretension. Character faces sometimes go flat, and the art leans American-TV-cartoon instead of anime, which breaks the visual promise of the format. None of that matters if you're eight years old and you just watched your favorite book happen on screen. That's the whole thing that hits.

Jack and Annie are siblings from the small American town of Frog Creek, and they could hardly be less alike: Jack devours every book he finds, while Annie throws herself into adventure. While heading home after chasing a weasel, they come across a tree house in the woods packed with books. When Jack casually wishes he could see the dinosaurs pictured in one of them, the siblings and the tree house are sent millions of years into the past. Annie is thrilled, but Jack mostly wants to get home safely. Then he finds a strange medallion clearly made by human hands. The siblings soon take on the job of gathering four medallions, each hidden in a different place and era, to help a magician named Morgan. The fantasy adventure film adapts Mary Pope Osborne's award-winning children's book series.