Bay Area animator Jim Capobianco’s “The Inventor,” about the life and times of Leonardo da Vinci, is geared toward children, gently providing a gateway to science and history with engaging characters and even a few musical numbers.

Capobianco — a co-founder of theBay Area International Children’s Film Festivaland a formerPixar Animation Studiosstory supervisor and artist who was nominated for an Academy Award for co-writing“Ratatouille”and has contributed to animated hits from“Toy Story 2”to“Monsters, Inc.”and“Finding Dory”——在这个低成本的激情projec度过了12年t, which opens in a half-dozen Bay Area theaters on Friday, Sept. 15.

At a time when science has become a cultural divider, its message of the value of an inquisitive mind is even more relevant now than when he started. “There are three kinds of people in the world,” da Vinci (voice of Stephen Fry,“红、白和皇家蓝”) says at one point. “Those who see, those who see what they are shown, and those who do not.”

“Inventor” is set in 1516, three years before da Vinci’s death, a period in which he fell out of favor of Pope Leo X (Matt Berry,“SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run”) and into the good graces of French king Francis I (Gauthier Battoue). Since most of da Vinci’s popular work, such as his paintings “The Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa,” were created in his later years, Capobianco and his team, which includes co-director Pierre-Luc Granjon, had no choice but to portray him as an older man.

But to appeal to younger viewers, da Vinci is portrayed as a kind Santa Clausian figure with a bushy gray beard. And there is less focus on his art (although the “Mona Lisa” does make an appearance) than his scientific imagination.

Da Vinci was a prolific sketcher, and his detailed drawings envisioned practical applications for his time, such as movable barriers and water diversion, and ideas that would only become practical centuries later, such as aircraft. The tension in “The Inventor” is the pressure he feels from Francis I and the king’s mother, Louise de Savoy (Marion Cotillard, the Apple TV+ series“Extrapolations”) to use his engineering skills for military purposes.

Da Vinci, though, has grander ambitions, the desire to live “a restless, questioning life, such as what is that breath of life that makes us who we are?”

To this end he has a champion in the king’s sister, Princess Marguerite (Daisy Ridley of the“Star Wars”sequels), who encourages his experimental humanitarian work.

The animation is a combination of a stop-motion style, which harks back to those holiday specials of the 1960s (“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”), and traditional 2D animation wherein da Vinci’s dreams and ideas are rendered in the style of his famous sketches and notebooks.

Oftentimes da Vinci is pleasantly lost in the cosmos of his mind, what Willy Wonka called “Pure Imagination.” The target audience of “The Inventor” will surely relate.

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com