Family Home Theater

Grade: B+
Entire family: No (ages 6 and under only)
1995, 120 min. (4 stories), Color
Time Life/StarVista
Not rated (would be G)
Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Featured audio: English mono
Bonus features: 4^th story is considered “bonus”
Amazon link

On the heels of Volume 3 comes The Beginners Bible: Volume 4, though it’s not really labeled as such. It simply says “4 complete stories”: “The Story of Joseph & His Brothers,” “The Story of Daniel & the Lion’s Den,” “The Story of the Battle of Jericho,” and one that’s offered as a “bonus,” “The Story of Jonah & the Whale.”

Like the other installments in this series, these animated Bible stories are really well adapted, with writing and dialogue that aim to be both contemporary and accessible for the target age group combined with animation that takes a page from Saturday morning cartoons. Any menace is softened and any didacticism is made more interesting with bright colors, rounded forms, and big eyes. Disobedient sheep smile, uh, sheepishly, and the whale looks cute as a bathtub toy—even smiling with big bright eyes as he descends to the deep with Jonah inside his belly. With a face like that, how can you expect a harsh end to poor Jonah—especially when Jonah voluntarily jumps overboard when the storm hits his ship and the crew thinks he’s brought them bad luck, rather than the men tossing him over the sides. In other words, anything that might seem harsh is somehow softened. The bright and cheery music helps, too.

And the prophet himself? In the marketplace Jonah comes upon a fish merchant and says, “You know how much I love eating fish,” which sets up a clever irony that shows the writers aren’t just going through the motions or talking down to the kids. Then, when Jonah sees a pigeon waiting for crumbs to fall, he tells the peddler, “And I’ll take a bag of peanuts. I see somebody just as hungry as I.”

The writers and filmmakers take such liberties as they add humanizing details to make the characters seem more interesting for youngsters, or to better explain and contextualize the stories. Joshua tells the king he defeats at Jericho, “When I told you God would give us this land, you called me a fool. Who’s the fool now?” There’s a little bit of “Nyah-nyah” in there that kids can identify with. The characters’ reluctance to obey God in the first place is often given more interpretive context: “I can’t do something to help my enemies,” Jonah says when God tells him to go preach to the Ninevites. “How can I preach to the enemies of the Israelites?” Some parents/purists might object, but making such connections more obvious and adding humanizing elements really does make the stories more palatable for the target age group.

Of these four, “Jonah & the Whale” and “Daniel & the Lion’s Den” are the most accessible to all ages because they are simple stories about a man’s faith in God being tested. It gets a little more complicated in “Joseph & His Brothers” and “The Battle of Jericho,” though the writers really do an excellent job of explaining the basics or slightly altering the motivations of the characters so that their actions make more sense to today’s children. It’s hard to believe that brothers would be so jealous of Joseph that they would want to kill him or sell him into slavery, and so their intent is reduced to a “Wouldn’t it be funny if we sold Joseph to those merchants?” Then laughter, and a pause. “Why not?”

Like the other volumes in this series, The Beginners Bible: Volume 4 is a winner because the filmmakers really adapt the stories well for young contemporary viewers: removing the violence and softening the harsh elements, changing the vernacular to be more contemporary, adding humanizing and fun animated details, and helping children to not just understand the stories but to understand the characters’ emotional responses. Yes, they take liberties, but ultimately their decisions pay off. They really hit the mark for their target audience.