The talking vegetable stars in the CGI animated JONAH: A VeggieTales Movie trivialize this story about apparently real events and people from 775 BC.

The real story has a reluctant prophet who i s compelled to deliver a final messaage to a wicked city: repent or be vaporized. Jonah hates the enemy so much he runs away. Maybe he knows God to be merciful and fears that the cruel regime in Ninevah will repent. Unfortunartely, you can’t run away from God, so when strange curcumstances alow Jonah to be swallowed and and then spit up by a great fish, this astonishing story spreads throughout the land. Perhaps years later, when Jonah finally reaches Ninevah where the people worship a great man-fish god, they are ready to believe Jonah becuase he himself came out of a supernatutural fish-god and thus Jonah is trustworthy as God’s spokesman. Why else would they even let Jonah in the gates?

And to Jonah’s chagrin, God shows mercy to these bloodthirsty pagans.

Incidentally, around 765 BC, according to ancient records in the great library at Damascus, Ninevah became for a period of time monotheistic. Amazing, if you think about it.

An animated Jonah could be a great project. This version is simplistic and borderline stupid. An insult even to kids.

And someone please tell me, why talking vegetables?
Rating: 1 / 5

This is not the type of movie I want my child to watch.
Rating: 1 / 5

If you’re already of fan of VeggieTales stories, and you have a high tolerance for Christian proselytizing (even the bland kind that turns complex and often disturbing Biblical stories into happy-face Sunday School mush) and your children are easily amused by mediocre animation (i.e. either very young or rather dim), you’ll be happy. Everyone else is likely to find this tale boring, baffling, and just plain disturbing.

Boring because in 85 minutes there are few memorable songs or even scenes that anyone over the age of 6 would enjoy. The strangely amputated vegetables (if you’re going to give an asparagus a pair of eyes, why deny it a pair of arms and legs so that its forced to hop along on vegetal stumps) lack a full range of expression necessary for truly engaging animated characters.

Baffling because – other than one lonely little carrot in the sidebar story – there is not a single female character in the entire picture. Of course, it’s a Christian tradition to omit or erase female existence, but apparently the male animators, in their all-male imagination, have no qualms about offering little girls a universe in which their gender is utterly invisible.

If that’s not disturbing enough, the cheery vegetables and their wacky adventures cloak a sinister message that compassion toward others can only be obtained through the worship of a supernatural deity. How many parents want their children to believe that they are incapable of kindness toward others unless they’re supplicating some god?
Not that this god is even rendered faithfully. The Christian movie-makers rightly concluded that the true story of Job — wherein God, engaged in a pissing contest with Satan, green-lights the murder of Job’s children – would send an audience of 6-year-olds and their parents screaming for the exits, thus we get this whitewashed God-as-loving-father advertisement in its place. So much for accuracy from `the-Bible-says-it-so-I-believe-it’ crowd.

In other words, if you have no qualms about sitting your kids in an all-male revue where cartoon character sing Christian ditties denying that decency and civility are possible without god-worship, you’ll have a great time.
Rating: 2 / 5

Rating: 5 / 5