A slingshot, a fishing rod, a wooden top, a jar of aggies, and a well-thumbed copy of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn line the sun-touched walls of a Mississippi boy's bedroom in My Dog Skip, an adaptation of the late Willie Morris' childhood memoir. There's a spit-glossed cliché to be found in every frame of the film, but its golden nostalgia is more bracing and warm than intolerably sentimental, and wholesome without self-consciousness or cynicism. Frankie Muniz, star of TV's caffeinated sitcom Malcolm In The Middle, is suitably animated as the boyhood Morris, a bookish and scrawny kid growing up in the Deep South during WWII. A natural target for bullies, he loses his only friend when the town's star athlete (Luke Wilson) goes off to fight Hitler. Over the objections of his forbidding father (Kevin Bacon), himself an embittered war veteran, Muniz's mother (Diane Lane) gets him a lovable Jack Russell terrier to combat his loneliness and teach him responsibility. Though in many ways a typical boy-and-his-dog story, with requisite scenes of the animal in cuteness (sitting upright with a bag of popcorn in a movie-theater seat) and in peril (doing battle with evil bootleggers), My Dog Skip is smarter and more progressive than others in the genre. In contrast to the anthropomorphic freaks found in most family films, Muniz's beloved companion is just a normal dog. But as a shy kid with few friends, simply caring for it forces him to leave his shell and take notice of the world around him. By the end of the touching story, the dog's influence is sweetly unmistakable.