Have I mentioned yet that there are 35 official entries for Animated Feature this year? Because there are. Thirty-five fucking movies, even though several high-quality films were left off! As of right now, it looks like I’ll end up taking in 32 of them, which is far from shabby. I’m just miffed that once again I won’t be able to clear the list despite my best efforts. At this point, I’d need a miracle, or some other form of divine intervention.
Instead, we’ve got more bible flicks.
As I’ve gone over multiple times, I’m not against religion, or even films with a religious bent. What I’m against is using cinema as a means to preach, and the associated expectation that we give for-profit organizations money for the privilege. The bible has many great stories in it, as does every major religious text, but when it comes to movies, it’s a rare thing when the stories are treated as such, rather than as literal history and a clarion call to worship. It’s even more nefarious when it’s done in animated form, because you’re directing this craven exercise at children who haven’t been taught the critical thinking skills to question what they see. There’s a reason why, when you look up these films on sites like Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll see a review score typically in the 60s-70s, with the consensus being along the lines of of something like, “an interesting visual interpretation of the story,” whereas the audience score will hover between 95 and 100, with an all-too-ready built-in audience saying that the movie is the word of God in cinematic form – even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff.
As much as I complain, though, it’s with the understanding that there is a way to do this properly, and it’s called The Prince of Egypt. Just like The Ten Commandments, it’s a faithful telling of the Book of Exodus, with some creative and dramatic flair thrown in. The difference is that the focus is on the characters rather than on the supernatural element. The story, the art style, the music, they’re all far more concerned with the relationship between Moses and Rameses, first as adoptive brothers and then as rivals and enemies. Yes, God plays a huge part in the overall narrative, but the emphasis was on making this a human story first, and that’s why it’s still so beloved over 25 years later.
What we get now is not that, and it doesn’t even try. Most of these movies – especially the animated ones – are just Sunday School at the cinema. What’s the worse sin, the capitalistic greed or the slothful laziness in the production? Surely Jesus would be totally cool with both.
Anyway, somehow, against all logic – something these people have a BIG problem with – there were three of these flicks put out in 2025. Curiously, The King of Kings, which was arguably the most creative because it used the Charles Dickens angle and at least attempted an immersive experience for the young viewers, was not put forward for Oscar consideration. The other two were, and in my completist quest, I did give them a shot. Let’s see how they fared.
Hint, not well.
David
Released by Angel Studios – who also made The King of Kings – David is at least a refreshing change of pace for the studio, because for once we’re focused on an Old Testament story from the Book of Samuel rather than yet another Jesus plot. That’s about where the “originality” ends, though, because the film itself is far too straightforward in some parts, and in others it breaks one of the Commandments by outright stealing from other works.
The basic plot follows the bullet points of its source material, where the young shepherd from Bethlehem (voiced by Brandon Engman as a child and Christian Pop singer Phil Wickham as a teenager) is anointed by the prophet Samuel (Brian Stivale) as the new king of Israel, chosen by the Almighty, who has apparently soured on his previously-chosen monarch Saul (Adam Michael Gold), who has become too attached to power. David is summoned to Saul’s palace by complete coincidence because word has reached the king about the boy’s skill with the lyre. David plays a song, wins Saul’s favor, and is eventually welcomed like a son. Later, guided by his faith, David volunteers to face Goliath (Kamram Nikhad) in a battle of solo champions between the Israelites and the Philistines. David slays Goliath with a stone from a slingshot, and is lauded as a hero.
As he grows up, David becomes close friends with Saul’s son Jonathan (Mark Jacobson), and the two lead the Israeli army through a prosperous era, but Saul becomes paranoid about this so-called usurper to his throne. When he realizes it’s David, he exiles the boy and tries to hunt him and his followers down. When the Israelites are attacked again by both the Philistines and the Amalekites, David steps up once again, and through faith, he’s able to defeat his enemies and become the most glorious and gracious king. Yay. Conveniently, the film ends with another “special message” asking for more money instead of going into any detail about David’s reign, including all the sexual abuse, murder, and the affair with Bathsheba, to name just a few. I mean, what would be the point of an honest portrayal of scripture?
I will give the film two bits of positive credit. For one, the animation is pretty good. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it doesn’t look like a half-rendered flipbook like some other entries in this subgenre. You can tell actual effort was made to make this at least look as epic as the filmmakers want it to feel. Second, there are moments here and there where the characterization approaches the human level of The Prince of Egypt, particularly as it relates to David’s relationship with his mother Nitzevet (Israeli singer Miri Mesika). In those scenes, you definitely get more of a feel for David as a person rather than as a biblical hero.
Everything else, however, is pretty bad. For one, the film is presented as a musical, with several original songs, all of which are mindlessly generic and/or praise shlock. This leads further into the major production flaw, which is that it seems like the creators wanted to make a film that played like a 90s Disney film, so they just straight up ripped off a bunch of 90s Disney films. David parkours through a village to evade some adults – Aladdin. David defies the laws of physics by swinging on a rope – The Hunchback of Notre Dame. David ages through a song sequence and has two comic relief friends, one skinny the other fat, who discover him in the desert and think he’s dead – The Lion King. The climactic song is a meaningless statement of defiance that somehow wins the day – Wish. Okay, that last one wasn’t 90s, but you get the point. There are even some shots that look like carbon copies of shots from the likes of Beauty and the Beast and Tarzan. It’s so brazen as to be insulting.
On a more thematic level, the problem is in the messaging. I get the impression that the filmmakers think their overall moral is that if you just have faith, things will work out. You will be delivered from your suffering as long as you follow God. Unfortunately, the way this picture plays out, the real message is more akin to saying that God is fickle, and you’ll be fine so long as He still favors you, but if He doesn’t, you’re jolly well fucked.
Why do I say this? Well, look at the plot progression. We’re told that God chose Saul to be king, but that God no longer wants that because Saul did something wrong. Do we see what Saul did wrong? Not in the slightest. Perhaps if we did, we might have some context for the central conflict. Instead we’re just told this by Samuel, a person who gets no backstory or framing as a character or prophet, so we have no justification to believe he’s a conduit for God’s will. He simply just says, “I’ve spoken to God, and He says Saul can’t be king anymore.” Well, I guess we just have to take your word for it. I mean, who would ever make that up (*gestures broadly at every self-proclaimed prophet and messiah in history)? If we see what Saul did to offend God and lose His grace, or any sort of credentials for Samuel, this might have had an impact. Instead, Saul accidentally becomes a sympathetic figure, because for all he knows, he’s still in good with the Almighty, doing exactly what needs to be done, and yet some old man is saying that someone else gets his position, one previously ordained to him by the highest power in the universe. I mean, wouldn’t you be defensive, or at least a bit skeptical?
I mean, think how imaginative it would be to approach this from the possibility that God erred in picking Saul in the first place. In so many other religions, the various gods and goddesses – be they of ancient myth or modern polytheism – are imperfect beings who make mistakes. What makes people worship them (or invoke them as bad omens) is in how they do, or don’t, atone for those mistakes and become better, more benevolent deities. But in the Judeo-Christian tradition, God has to be infallible, incapable of getting anything wrong. Yet He somehow changed His mind about Saul. That’s outright contradictory, unless we’re shown whatever sin Saul committed to make God rethink His choices, and even then, it’s still the equivalent of, “Well, I guess I was wrong about that guy.” If we can’t have that moment of introspection, the only other logical conclusion to draw is that God chose Saul knowing that he’d fuck up and eventually incur His wrath, which at best makes God shortsighted and at worst makes Him an outright dick!
So why not explore that? Even if you settle on the “mysterious ways” cop-out, we can at least get an argument for why any of this matters. Because let’s be perfectly honest here, this film shows us nothing special about David that distinguishes him from anyone else, other than perhaps his singing voice and complete blind faith. The film relies on us already knowing the abridged version of David’s story in order for us to get behind him, with “God said so” filling in the gaps. And that’s the real problem here, not just with this movie, but in most of those put out. It’s all about obedience without question, even when the logical fallacies are staring you dead in the face, and reality says that no matter how faithful you are, sometimes things just don’t work out. There is no 1:1 correlation between a level of devotion and reward. This film argues that there is while dishonestly obscuring anything that would countermand that thesis, and trying to exploit the viewer’s beliefs to empty their pockets. For shame.
Grade: C-
Light of the World
This will probably shock you, but I came very close to actually enjoying this one. It’s yet another basic telling of the life of Jesus, but this one takes it from the perspective of the Apostle John, the youngest of the 12. It’s an interesting idea, certainly, because it gives the young target audience something of a cipher, similar to how The King of Kings used Charles Dickens’s son Walter as the child viewer analog. The film also gives us a context for why we should give a damn about what’s going on, and the animation is creative and unique. Unfortunately, once we get to the meat (or is it loaves and fishes) of the story, it all becomes anodyne and fizzles out.
Ian Hanlin stars as Jesus (he’s a seasoned voice actor from Canada, having worked on the likes of My Little Pony, Beyblade, and the Ninjago series), though pointedly, we don’t really meet him until the end of the first act. Instead, the focus is on John (Benjamin Jacobson), the son of a fisherman (David Pettitt, another veteran voiceover artist). His mother Salome (Erin Mathews, yet another VO vet) tells him and his older brother James (Dylan Leonard) about the Hebrew people’s hope for a messiah, mostly in the form of bedtime stories. John takes them to heart and believes that the messiah will come, which is perfectly innocent and endearing. More than anything, though, he wants to be seen as useful to his family, who are having trouble paying their taxes to Rome.
Through pure coincidences, John winds up meeting John the Baptist (Jesse Inocalla, referred to only as “The Baptizer” until it’s convenient to tell John that they shared the same name), and even briefly Jesus himself in his work as a carpenter. John the Baptist is depicted as a kooky hippie who eats bugs, Jesus is just a random nice guy at first, and John himself gets into some mischief, particularly around a Roman soldier named Lucius (Colin Murdock) and the local tax collector, the eventual Apostle Matthew (Adam Kozlick). John only confirms who Christ is when he meets him at the Wedding at Cana, where scripture says he turned water into wine. After that miracle, and another where Jesus enables John’s father to catch enough fish to satisfy his tax bill, John and his brother and friends officially join up and meet the other Apostles.
This first third is, honestly, kind of intriguing. The 2D animation is bright and expressive, with tight yet exaggerated angular forms that suggest something similar to Samurai Jack or The Powerpuff Girls. There’s an actual style to it all, giving the scenery a bit of personality. John is a fun and relatable character, an excellent focal point for the young viewer, because kids always wonder what they can do to help and can often resent being dismissed for their age and small stature. His emotional needs for acceptance and sense of empathy can be resonant for just about anyone, and even grade school-level audience members understand the burden that is taxation. Further, there’s even, dare I say, a sense of humor to what unfolds. It’s not laugh out loud funny, but you can tell that the filmmakers wanted children to latch onto John, and so there are a few slapstick-esque bits and a couple of clever jokes. Again, nothing revolutionary, but when I see anything resembling actual effort in these pictures, I do feel duty-bound to point them out and laud them.
From then on, however, it’s all downhill. The last two acts are just a sanitized version of the New Testament, from the miracles to the Passion, all told in a very by-the-numbers way. The identity of the film is lost, the focus turns from one of levity to John constantly whining about how everything Jesus goes through is unfair, and in fact the name “Jesus” gets repeated ad nauseam to the point where it almost loses all meaning because by the time we get to the crucifixion it feels like it’s every other spoken word. None of this is egregiously bad, just insanely disappointing, because it looked like we finally had a bible story that actually had momentum and a degree of creativity, only to use it as little more than a baited hook. Once the first act is over, where the kiddies might actually be excited about what they see, the whole thing turns into a sermon, and I just stop caring. It also doesn’t help that the Pharisees are once again depicted as Jewish stereotypes (though at least we have Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea as dissenting voices for once), and Judas (David Kaye) is basically a second-rate villain from a Don Bluth movie, so obviously evil that one wonders why Jesus would have kept him around in the first place.
It really is a shame, because as I’ve often said, bible stories do have value, whether you subscribe to the faith or not. But as a form of entertainment, you actually have to entertain people, and just like with David, Light of the World cares far more about manipulating children into the pews than in actually making a film worth watching. The devotion is all that matters, and everything has to be taken at face value, rather than giving us a reason for it. It’s been done well before, as I previously noted, but just like The King of Kings, neither of these entries come close to the heights they could have, settling instead for using the theatre’s box office as a giant collection plate. This one is definitely better than most, but that’s not saying much.
Grade: C+
Join the conversation in the comments below! Did you see either of these films? Should there be a separate consideration for faith-based movies when it comes to overall quality? If I go to work with a water bottle full of wine, can I just proclaim it as a miracle if I get caught? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!
I Actually Paid To See This 