Newsbites: The animated Bible story edition!
Two new Noah projects, sort of, and one new series about David.
Young David series to start streaming next month
As you may know, Angel Studios has been attached to a feature-length animated film about the biblical shepherd-turned-king David for a couple years now—but first, there’s going to be a streaming series, a prologue of sorts called Young David, and this week it was officially announced that the series will premiere next month.
The first episode will drop November 10, and it will be available via the Angel app as well as through a Christian streaming service for children called Minno.
The series will consist of five episodes, released at a rate of one per month:
November 10 — “Warrior”
December 8 — “King”
January 12 — “Shepherd”
February 9 — “Poet”
March 8 — “Worshiper”
The film, for its part, is currently aiming for a theatrical release in 2025. Like all Angel projects, it relies on crowd-funding for its financing, and it has already raised over $50 million, which makes it the largest crowd-funded entertainment project ever.
I have written about the film and the series before, most recently in June 2022, and I’m still curious about some of the issues I raised back then, e.g. how much of this series will consist of biblical material and how much of it will be, for lack of a better word, generic stories about shepherding or relying on God for help, etc., etc.
Also, after seeing so much footage of David with his sheep, I’m beginning to wonder if this series—or even the film—will have any other human characters!
I also find it interesting that the first episode of this children’s series is called “Warrior”. The biblical David is certainly a violent figure almost from the moment we meet him—killing Goliath, etc.—but some of the stories about his violence are not exactly kid-friendly. And of course, God himself said he couldn’t let David build the Temple precisely because David was a “warrior” (I Chronicles 22:8, 28:3).
I was already curious to see how the movie would handle those themes; now I wonder what the series will do with them, at this early stage of David’s life.
At any rate, you can watch a trailer for the first episode here:
Brazilian Noah’s Ark cartoon gets market screenings
Here’s another project I’ve written about in the past: Noah’s Ark: A Musical Adventure—a Brazilian cartoon produced by Walter Salles and based on the work of Vinicius de Moraes—is getting a couple of market screenings in California next week.
The film, which follows two mice who sneak aboard the Ark and try to “use music to break the tension and help these cooped up creatures survive the 40 days and 40 nights together”, has been in the works since at least 2014.
The last time I wrote about the film, in November 2020, it was about to be screened as a “work in progress” at a market for Latin American films.
Next week’s screenings are taking place in Santa Monica on November 1-2.
I see that the film has a new poster, too—at any rate, it’s new to me—and it reveals, for the first time that I can recall, who the three lead actors are:
As it happens, two of these actors have been in biblical or Bible-adjacent films before. Rodrigo Santoro played Jesus in the 2016 version of Ben-Hur,1 and Alice Braga played Sophia, the personification of God’s wisdom, in 2017’s The Shack.
So… is the Noah’s Ark film ready to come out yet? Well, maybe.
The website for Symbiosis Entertainment, one of the film’s production companies, says it has an 84-minute runtime—which would seem to suggest that the editing is finished, at least—and the IMDb says the film is coming out in December… in Turkey. And then it will apparently come out in Russia and France early next year.
But there is no word yet about when the film might come out in its native Brazil—or, indeed, anywhere else in Latin America. So make what you will of that.
Crowd-funding begins for an anime take on Genesis
Here’s a project that I haven’t written much about in the past, but I’ve been meaning to: Angel Studios has started raising money for Gabriel and the Guardians, a series they announced in May that puts an anime spin on the early chapters of Genesis.
The series’ growing voice cast includes Johnny Yong Bosch (Power Rangers) as Gabriel, Matt Lanter (The Clone Wars’ Anakin Skywalker) as Nok, Cristina Vee (Miraculous) as Namay’ah, James Arnold Taylor (The Clone Wars’ Obi-Wan Kenobi) as the main antagonist Malachros, and Cristina Milizia (League of Legends) as Zion.
I actually spoke to series creator Jason Moody about the series a few months ago and have been meaning to post something about that. Soon, maybe.
In the meantime, you can watch a teaser for the series here:
He also played Xerxes, a Persian king who figures prominently in the book of Esther, in the decidedly not-biblical movie 300 (2006) and its sequel 300: Rise of an Empire (2014).