Director Tom McCarthy's last film, "Spotlight" (2015), was a quiet epic of journalistic diligence that won the Best Picture Academy Award and earned him a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

His next film? "Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made," a whimsical, heartfelt family film about a boy detective, premiering Friday, Feb. 7, on the Disney+ streaming service.

"I think if you track my career, I tend to zigzag a little bit, anyway," said McCarthy, who grew up in New Providence, Union County.

He followed a trio of character dramas — "The Station Agent" (2003), "The Visitor" (2007) and "Win Win" (2011) — with the Adam Sandler magical realism vehicle "The Cobbler" (2014), and along the way earned his first Oscar nomination for his work on the screenplay to Disney and Pixar's "Up" (2009).

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In fact, McCarthy started work on "Timmy Failure," an adaptation of Stephan Pastis' 2013 franchise-starting best-seller, before making "Spotlight."

"I loved the challenge of trying to crack it and make a live-action kids' movie that adults could watch, that had something to say, that felt original in its tone and in its structure, that gave kids a different cinematic experience than just the sort of classical Disney ride, which I think can be great but I think there's room for more sorts of experiences, cinematically, in a kid's life because these kids are so sophisticated now," McCarthy explained.

"So there were a lot of reasons I wanted to make this movie that were just driven by my curiosity and artistic intent. That's always what it's about for me. A lot of people say, 'Well, how do you do this after 'Spotlight?' and I'm like, 'Well, first of all, that's not totally factually accurate, and secondly it's not how I think.' I'm not like, 'What's my follow-up to my Oscar-winning movie?' I'm more simple than that, I guess. I'm just like, 'This is exciting and challenging.'"

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McCarthy's film stars Winslow Fegley as Timmy Failure, an imaginative kid in Portland, Oregon, who runs his own detective agency.

Like a family-friendly companion to "Inherent Vice" or "The Big Lebowski," the film is an idiosyncratic subversion of noir storytelling as Timmy's investigation takes him from a missing backpack to a dead class hamster to his mother's stolen segue — with Timmy assisted by his polar bear sidekick.

"What it's really about is this kid's journey into understanding his place in the world, understanding that he can hold on to who he is as he grows up, even hold on to possibly his bear," McCarthy said. "But he has to adapt. He has to make changes. He has to figure out a way to work within society as opposed to just outside of it."

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Timmy's story is the latest in a long history of detective fiction for children that's included sleuths like Tintin, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown.

McCarthy, who co-starred on the fifth season of HBO's landmark investigative Baltimore drama "The Wire," said there's a simple reason why generation after generation of kids have been drawn to such stories.

The story continues after the video.

"We're always trying to figure out the world in a way that makes sense to us," said McCarthy. "I think it's exactly the same reason adults like procedurals, which is ultimately what we're talking about, right? It's making sense of things. It's finding order in chaos, and it's also finding, of course, entertainment. And so for all the reasons that we're attracted to it, young people are attracted to it. It's not that different. We're not that different, as much as we like to think we are."