“Sketch” is a children’s film, a “Bridge to Terabithia,” “Where the Wild Things Are” variation about a child’s fantasy life — angry, monstrous drawings sketched in reaction to grief — invading her real world.

Aspiring artist Amber (Bianca Belle) isn’t the only one bending reality to cope with the loss of her mother. Her older brother Jack (Kue Lawrence) has dreamed up an enchanted pond in the woods behind their house where broken things are magically mended. So he’s toting around Mom’s ashes, apparently with the notion of bringing her back.

That pond isn’t the sort of place to drop a notebook of surreal, Minecraft-inspired monster sketches.

Their Dad (Tony Hale) is lost in his own grief, selling their house with the aid of his sister (D’Arcy Carden) to escape the memories. The realtor-sister advice about depersonalizing the house — no pictures with “faces” in them left out for prospective buyers to see — may be common practice, but it plays as another cruel reminder to dad Taylor every time he helps “stage” it for another showing.

Neither of them is prepared when the monsters come to Maple Street. Or Ash or Oak or wherever.

That’s not wholly original, especially the “Minecraft” verbal and visual references. But it’s a promising enough comical kids’ movie premise. How do you combat these monsters? You sketch fanciful weapons. If the Eye-der (eyeball spider) monsters were sketched in chalk, stump them to dust or wash them away. Crayon? Wax melts if you “flamethrower” it.

But the execution of writer-director Seth Worley’s doesn’t turn up pathos or laughs. And the kids? Well…

Every so often — once a year, maybe once every other year — a modest budget (the effects are digitally simple here) film goes into release that has soundtrack problems that a major studio production would have corrected in post-production.

“Sketch” goes into theaters the lacking looping time it would have taken to give the kids a shot at making their dialogue intelligible. Sure, you keep the take where they hit their marks. There’s even some acting (not much) in evidence — in the action scenes if not the emotional ones. One punchline lands.

“How are you going to get ‘it’ to chase you,” the teasing punk Bowan (Kalon Cox) whom Amber has a crush on is asked?

“By doing what I do best — being a huge B-hole!”

Mumbled lines might have been invented by Brando and aren’t solely a problem with child actors. But when the dialogue is rushed through and the word-emphasis in sentences is consistently botched, your quirky, off-key action comedy starts to play as surreal — or filmed in Dutch without subtitles.

“Sketch” needed to have huge patches of kid dialogue looped just to get the back story, exposition and character names straight in the viewers’ mind. It’s so bad that I had to switch to headphones to try and parse out the words reviewing it after the mystifying mumbling of the early scenes.

Any good performance by a child in a film is a minor miracle, and the great ones stick with you. But those kids are rarely “born with it.” They’ve been trained.

Lots of people think their beautiful little darling was born to show off, “act” and work her or his way from community theater to the big or small screen.

But stage parents who come up with a catchy stage name, find an agent and getting bookings for a kid who maybe hasn’t progressed beyond local kiddie productions of “Shrek! The Musical Jr” or “101 Dalmatians Jr.” would be a lot better served by getting them elocution lessons.

And maybe ask any director casting for a movie if he’s got the budget for looping in post-production.

Rating: PG, comical violence, mild profanity

Cast: Tony Hale, Bianca Belle, Kue Lawrence, Kalon Cox, Randa Newman and D’Arcy Carden

Credits: Scripted and directed by Seth Worley. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 1:33