DIRECTOR Robert Connolly and novelist Steve Worland have created a sweet, structurally linear, dramatically simple film about youthful determination, great children’s cinema that grown-ups might perhaps consider too simplistic but heck, we were all kids once.

Ed Oxenbould plays 12-year-old Dylan, living on a hardscrabble rural property with his dad Jack (Sam Worthington) effectively catatonic since his wife died five months earlier. Dylan’s a bright kid, fascinated by flight, encouraged by World War 2 Spitfire pilot Grandpa (Terry Norris). Teacher Hickenlooper (Peter Rowsthorn) has set a practical exercise – folding an A4 sheet into a paper plane capable of flying out of the classroom window.

Dylan competes in a regional contest from which success propels him into the national competition to represent Australia at the world championships in Japan. At the selections in Sydney, Dylan meets Kimi (Ena Imai) and Justin (Nicholas Bakopoulos-Cooke) who has inherited a win-at-all-costs ethos from his golfer dad (David Wenham, rather wasted in a role of limited significance).

The film’s flight elements generate some passages that I suspect got their visual loveliness in a computer. Never mind. “Paper Planes” is for the young in years or at heart, more intelligent and less unbelievable than the formulaic fantasy mush infesting cinemas during summer holidays and at other times..

At Hoyts, Palace Electric, Dendy and Limelight