"Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams"

The kids, of course, are the movie's main characters, and the predicament in which Carmen and Juni find themselves here is that they could be deposed by two kids who aren't nearly the spies they are. The further complication is that Carmen, who's just on the cusp of adolescence, thinks the hotshot Gary Giggles is kind of cute.

Juni, understandably, finds this sickening, but he gets his revenge on Gary during one of the movie's most beautifully staged special-effects scenes, in which the two go head-to-head on the backs of giant mutant animals (Juni's is a combo ape and spider; Gary's is a cross between a snake and a lizard) whose jerkily realistic moves come straight out of old Ray Harryhausen movies.

"Spy Kids 2" is filled with love for those old-fashioned special effects. (In another of my favorite scenes, Carmen fends off an army of skeletons borrowed directly from "Jason and the Argonauts.") And in rendering them as affectionately as he has, Rodriguez may have unlocked one of the secrets of using modern technology to make good old-fashioned special effects. His Harryhausen-inspired creatures don't look or move like computer-generated figures (there's a slight awkwardness to them), and it's precisely their lack of hyperrealism that makes them so believable.

Rodriguez understands movie-fantasy logic perfectly: The more realistically you render a fantasy image, the less the mind believes it. But if you leave the imagination to fill in a few of the blanks for itself, the image takes on a vividness that not even the most advanced technology can inspire.

Rodriguez wrote, directed, produced, edited and shot "Spy Kids 2." He also did the production design and co-wrote the movie's music. You might call him a control freak, although control freaks don't usually have a sensibility as delicate as his. I can't imagine a true megalomaniac coming up with an effect as enchanting as the one that we see about halfway through the movie.

The island where the kids land has only one human inhabitant, a mad scientist named Romero (Steve Buscemi, in a wonderfully eggheady performance). Romero had the brilliant idea of shrinking animals down to size so children could have their own miniature zoos. But his experiment went awry, and he accidentally created a menagerie of mutant creatures who -- as the result of yet another accident -- grew to be larger than life-size and now roam the island freely, terrorizing intruders.

In Romero's secluded island lab, he shows off his miniature creations to Carmen and Juni. He opens a container and out marches a promenade of tiny live animals, from lions to elephants to penguins, any of which could sit in the palm of your hand; there's even a troupe of scrambling monkeys who spill out of -- what else? -- a pint-size barrel.

Romero's mini-mutants are odder but perhaps even more charming: There's a catfish (a spotted house cat with a fish's head), as well as the aforementioned "spider monkey" (really a spider ape, but why quibble?). The movie even has the good grace, ultimately, to bring Romero face-to-face with his own giant escaped mutant creations: It's not that they don't love their daddy -- they were just having fun.

In addition to those animal marvels, Rodriguez gives us the expected array of gadgets and gewgaws: There are dragonfly-shaped submarines, automated nose-pickers and inflatable suits that allow their wearers to float in water (although they have a tendency to bloat, like Violet Beauregarde in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory").

As he did with the first "Spy Kids," Rodriguez infuses his movie with the sense that no matter how wonderful it is to have adventures, home is also a lovely place to be. The Cortezes live in a fantastic Mediterranean castle, the kind of place you'd want to come home to after a grand caper. It's a setting that's neither urban nor suburban, and it suggests a seamless blending of cultures -- it's a nod to Juni and Carmen's own heritage, but more than that, it's a suggestion that life doesn't necessarily have to be lived within familiar confines.

"Spy Kids 2" is a multicultural movie in the best sense -- not just because it features Latino actors as well as Anglo ones, but because it blends the seams between multiple worlds so deftly that they almost disappear. Rodriguez doesn't shrink the world down to a convenient, manageable size -- he gives us the means to see it all in a broader context, and to recognize that it's bigger than we ever imagined. The bad news is that geography and culture are always going to divide us; the good news is, it's all navigable by dragonfly submarine.

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