Dreambuilders

Cert TBC, selected cinemas

Animated cinema has stepped up in recent years to help prepare young people for the challenges their formative years may well throw at them. Inside Out (2015), Pixar’s Oscar-winning saga about the emotional control room inside a preteen girl, remains the benchmark for this type of film, but this Danish offering does a fairly good job too.

It tells of Minna (voiced by Emilie Kroyer Koppel), who is facing the upheaval of her dad’s new fiancee moving in along with her own daughter, a horrid Insta-addict called Jenny. Minna misses her late mother dearly, and this new living arrangement is disrupting the peace she and her dad have enjoyed.

When she discovers that the world of her dreams is being run by a production crew of small blue men, the potential to sort Jenny out opens up before her. When she loses control of things, however, she puts Jenny at real risk and has to go deep inside her dreamworld to save her.

Co-directors Kim Hagen Jensen and Tonni Zinck wed the raft of zany characters with the inherent anxieties very effectively, while the same animation team behind Big

Hero 6 creates a memorable world that is equal parts Wizard of Oz and Monsters Inc. One word of caution though — at times Dreambuilders is perhaps a little scary for very young viewers.