Christian children’s entertainment is a tricky business.
It’s hard enough to explain to adults the nature of the triune Godhead, let alone a child who will be distracted by any blur of movement in their peripheral vision. Worse yet is that when something does manage to hold their attention, it usually never lets go. There’s also the Christian animator’s challenge of producing something that won’t melt the parents’ brain upon the 90th rewatch.
“The King of Kings” is just the most recent in a long lineage, from more successful attempts like 1999’s “The Miracle Maker,” to the less successful ones found in Walmart discount bins across this great nation.
Released in theaters April 11, “The King of Kings” is a retelling of the life of Christ, but with a rather innovative framing device: An animated Charles Dickens is both narrator and character as he recounts the life of Jesus to his young son Walter. During the movie, father and son walk through and interact with the Gospel stories through the power of imagination. It’s the most novel aspect of the film, but also a tad awkward. Young Walter seems awfully unfamiliar with stories even the most lapsed children absorb through osmosis; he must have been utterly baffled for seven Christmases prior.
The film is based on Dickens’ children’s book “The Life of Our Lord,” written in his own attempt to teach his children about Jesus in a manner they’d relate to. (It seems Christian children’s entertainment has been an eternal struggle, probably going back to the manger itself.) Dickens wrote it for the exclusive audience of his own children, making them promise they wouldn’t publish it until after his death. I’ve been told from reliable sources that this happened some years ago, so there’s no worry in us seeing it now.
“The Life of Our Lord,” in true Dickens fashion, is a fascinating blend of raw sincerity and a certain wryness. “The King of Kings” captures the former if not the latter, though more Dickens adaptations fail this test than not.
The movie takes more creative license with Dickens’ life than the Gospels, for instance paring down his children from nine to a more easily animated three. He and his wife also seem rather chummy for a marriage that would end a decade later with him failing to falsely commit her to an asylum. But that is beyond the scope of this movie, and thus my review.
Interestingly, the film doesn’t shy away from stories usually elided in Sunday school curriculums. We see Herod plot the massacre of the innocents (performed by Mark Hamill in his Joker voice), Lazarus rise from the dead, and the exorcism where the demons are driven into pigs and then off a cliff. None of these are violent enough to cause nightmares, but then most children not-so-secretly love such garish stories. (Grimm’s Fairy Tales remain popular because of the dismemberments, not despite them.)
Angel Studios certainly splurged on a marquee voice cast. Oscar Isaac voices Jesus (a promotion from when he played Joseph in 2006’s “The Nativity Story”), Uma Thurman is the poor doomed Catherine Dickens, Forest Whitaker is Peter, Ben Kingsley is Caiaphas, and Pierce Brosnan is Pontius Pilate. The crown jewel is Kenneth Branagh as Charles Dickens, who commits 100% and wrings some real pathos from what is a glorified narrator role.
The film is produced by a largely Korean crew, which makes it visually distinct from others in its class. It has higher ambitions than mere depiction, making it one of the more cinematic Christian children’s films I’ve seen recently. The “camera” is a character in its own right, plunging and zooming between the characters rather than keeping at a tasteful distance. This is all within the imagination of a young boy, which gives the film a certain freedom and frivolity. In one scene, the apostles are introduced walking across the Dickens’ drawing room table, action-figure sized.
With a smaller studio comes a smaller budget, and while recent animated films like “Flow” demonstrate what can be accomplished with diminished means, this still can’t level up to the likes of Disney’s “Goliath.” The character designs are all a bit blocky, not unforgivable but a bit unreal (our heads should come to the right ideas, not right angles). Budgetwise, perhaps less could have been spent on landing James Bond to voice Pilate and a little more on the animation itself.
Still, the film’s animated backgrounds are beautiful, with the eye often wandering to the canopy of stars rather than what’s happening in the foreground. I always pictured the Sea of Galilee as something of a backwater, but here it looks like nothing less than the Italian riviera.
“The King of Kings” is not as awkward and prescriptive as other Christian media, remembering that a good movie is an end to itself, not merely a means. Children should enjoy it, and get a hoot out of the sassy antics of the Dickens’ pet cat Willa. Ripped straight from the Disney playbook (and all the better for it), she will hopefully reorient younger viewers back to the true meaning of the season, and more importantly, pull them from the tyrannical reign of the Easter Bunny. There’s room for only one king in town.
Source: Angelus News