by MALCOLM FRASER

Luc Besson is a busy guy. For a while there, it looked like he was content with occasionally producing installments of the Taxi franchise and other big-budget action schlock. But in the past year alone, he’s directed two films, the black-and-white pseudo-arthouse flick Angel-A and now Arthur and the Invisibles, a star-studded, live action/animated family fantasy spectacular.

Arthur (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Freddie Highmore) is an excitable youth being raised in the country by his frazzled grandmother (Mia Farrow); his parents are working overseas and his explorer grandfather has gone missing on an expedition. When a sleazy real estate developer threatens to buy out their property, Arthur follows his grandfather’s clues to discover a magical miniature world populated by elves in the backyard.

When he ventures into this parallel universe, the film switches to a 3-D animation developed specifically for the project. Accompanied by the elvin Princess Selenia (voiced by noted children’s author Madonna) and her brother Betameche (Jimmy Fallon), Arthur sets out to recapture his grandfather’s buried treasure from the evil Maltazard (David Bowie, dusting off his “kids’ movie villain” act you might recall from Labyrinth).

With such a multi-layered plot, and the switching between live-action and animation, the risk of collapsing into a total mess is substantial, but Besson pulls it off. Maybe thanks to his Euro pedigree, the plot is refreshingly short on Hollywood cookie-cutter formula, while the pace is snappy enough for the ADHD set. The animation is both lifelike and fantastical, more creative and fleshed-out than the overdigitized norm, and actually meshes well with the live-action scenes. The characters are all genuinely likeable (except for the appropriately wicked villains), and the adult audience is in good hands with a voice cast spanning from Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel to Jason Bateman, Rob and Nate Corddry and the ever-more-omnipresent Snoop Dogg.

Speaking of adults, Princess Selenia’s look seems built more for adolescent male fantasies than the prepubescent mindset, but perhaps that’s to be expected in the post-Britney era. Otherwise, this is a good safe bet for a family outing, as well as a reminder that Besson is a very capable filmmaker when he puts some effort into it.

Arthur and the Invisibles opens this Friday, Jan. 12

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