How much do we as Christians value animation as a medium?
Some of the earliest documented animation in history dates back to the late 1800s. According to Wikipedia, a French inventor Charles-Émile Reynaud created Pauvre Pierrot in 1892.
But when was the first Christian animation produced?If there is Christian animation before the 1950s it may not be well documented, otherwise we could be about sixty years behind in terms of animation!
Since the 1950s there might be only two animated productions that have targeted mature audiences. The animated short My Last Day is an unflinching brutal anime about the crucifixion of Jesus, similar to the Passion of the Christ. The second animation for mature audiences is The Bible Project. Of course, this is mature for intellectual and educational purposes and not for graphic content.
The majority of Christian animation has been made for children because we have BELIEVED that animation is ONLY for little kids.
The goal of Animation Ministry.com is to fulfill the Great Commission Jesus gave.One way of doing that is by producing feature length movies primarily for the PG-13 market, one that has been largely ignored for decades!
Below is a timeline of Christian animated media mostly compiled from Wikipedia.
1956
The Candlemaker (animated short)
1961
Davey And Goliath
1965
Jot, or Jot The Dot (series of shorts)
1980s
The Flying House (1982)
Superbook (1983)
The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible (1985)
The Kingdom Chums: Little David’s Adventure (1986)
Adventures in Odyssey (1987)
The Little Troll Prince (1987)
McGee and Me! (1989)
1990s
Secret Adventures (1993)
VeggieTales (1993)
Bibleman (1995)
Testament: The Bible in Animation (1996)
In the Beginning: The Bible Stories (1997)
The Prince of Egypt (1998)
Angelmouse (1999)
The Miracle Maker (1999)
2000
Joseph: King of Dreams (2000)
3-2-1 Penguins! (2000)
Jonah: A Veggie Tales Movie (2002)
Larryboy: The Cartoon Adventures (2002)
The Star of Christmas (2002)
Ben Hur (2003)
Bugtime Adventures (2003)
Hermie and Friends (2003)
The Legend of the Sky Kingdom (2003)
Lenny & Sid (2003)
Angel Wars (2004)
Auto-B-Good (2004)
Paws & Tales (2004)
Prince Vladimir (2006)
Friends and Heroes (2007)
The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A Veggie Tales Movie (2008)
2010s
The Lion of Judah (2011)
My Last Day (2011)
Bible Project (2014)
VeggieTales in the House (2014)
The Star (2017)
VeggieTales in the City (2017)
The VeggieTales Show (2019)
Go to -->> Animation Ministry <<-- for concept movie trailers and more information!
I am continually updating my website. The page for Judges 13 now has a concept trailer! You can see the tone and style that I'm striving for.
For more information plus storyboards little bit of behind the scenes, go to the link below!
If you like the concept trailer and want to see the movie come to life please share with your friends and family! Most Christians are unaware of the need for high quality animated movies.
Come check out my website! Animationministry.com is live! Bookmark the link and be sure to visit as I will be updating with more information!
PLEASE SHAREanimationministry.com with your friends. This is a new ministry and I cannot do this alone! Your help is greatly appreciated! Thank you!
The welcome page explains what the ministry is, the problem, the solution and why it's so important! You can go directly to the welcome page by clicking the link below!
Two years ago I stopped posting on my blog and on YouTube. At the time it didn't feel right to keep posting. During this time I refocused my thoughts and goals. Over the next few days I will show you what I have been working on. But for now, I give you my new logo!
Animation ministry is a culmination of all my thoughts on Christian animated storytelling. My vision for this ministry is becoming clearer and clearer.
You may have some questions about the logo, so read on to find out more!
Why is it so dark?
As Christians we are called to go into all of the world and introduce people to the light of Jesus. Also the dark tone is a signal that Animation Ministry is not for little children.
Why is it called Animation Ministry?
I believe in challenging our understanding of what animation can be as well as who we minister to.
Why use a weathered, old rock texture?
Because God is our rock, he is faithful and loving to us even at our worst.
First
a quick explanation of what animation is and what it is not.
Animation should not be confused with genre. Genres are categories,
such as, comedy, action or romance and are expressed through various
media. Animation is a medium, as are clay, paint or film. Some
genres, such as horror or romance, are usually restricted to specific
ages. However, media are not bound to any age range. This means that
animation is not solely for children.
- Tom Whaley
Get your copy of RETHINKING CHRISTIAN ANIMATION for Kindle --> here!
Another reason to use genres more deliberately and creatively is to draw people's curiosity. We want to make people wonder, “Why are churches supporting a movie that doesn't feel like a typical preachy Christian movie.” Sometimes we should create a mystery or a puzzle to solve.
- Tom Whaley
Rethinking Christian Animation is available for Kindle here.
We have a concentrated focus on protecting children from ungodly media and that overshadows our goal of fulfilling the Great Commission. It is like sending all missionaries to only one nation, ignoring the rest. We have created our own obstacle rather than a creative expression of worship. Our focus needs to be centered on Jesus and what He commanded us to do.
My book, Rethinking Christian Animation, is available on Kindle here As you read, you'll discover
▪ The current state of our animation and how we can improve
▪ Why quality matters to God
▪ Animation as an instrument of worship
▪ Who our audience could be
▪ How to think of animation in terms of evangelism
▪ How Christians in animation can gain support of the church
Check out the link above and share with people who are interested in this!
As you read, you'll discover
▪ The current state of our animation and how to improve
▪ Why quality matters to God
▪ Animation as an instrument of worship
▪ Who our audience could be
▪ How to think of animation in terms of evangelism
▪ How Christians in animation can gain support of the church
Check out the link above and share with people who are interested in this!
Since I created my Youtube channel I’ve been learning how people view my videos and how I communicate my thoughts. Overall the responses I’ve been getting are positive and encouraging! However, I have found out that some people are missing the point of my videos because they don’t like the setup before the key point. I know this because of the analytics show me when people leave my videos. Yeah I have a lot to learn about communicating better, but people could be a bit more patient too.Their fears could be eased if they watched my videos in their entirety. Ideally it would be nice if people would leave more feedback since I’d like to have conversations with people about these topics.
In my latest video about entertainment, the key point is, LET’S MAKE QUALITY CHRISTIAN CONTENT THAT NON-BELIEVERS GOTTA HAVE! But when people hear my setup they think I’m being judgmental about their own movie libraries and miss the point. *sigh*
In my video about genres, I forgot to say that we should ALSO make movies set in biblical times, not just sci-fi, fantasy or westerns. I think we can apply genres like action, suspense, or thriller to a Bible story set in biblical times. The goal is to make Bible stories feel more cinematic and inviting for our audiences.
Finally, this one is VERY IMPORTANT. I called my first video Age Restricted because we have been restricting ourselves to a very specific age range. I believe animation is not solely for toddlers. Also Christian animation could be designed to target nonbelievers. You know, EVANGELIZE!! We are missionaries leading people to Jesus.THIS IS IN STARK CONTRAST TO THE TYPICAL VIEW OF CHRISTIAN ANIMATION. Traditionally our thinking has been to PROTECT PROTECT PROTECT. Our thinking has been very inward focused and I don’t see how that fulfills the great commission. Yes, we definitely should protect little children and keep making animation for them, but when they grow up, there is zero Christian animated feature length movies for young adults. My goal is to EXPAND OUR AUDIENCE. THE POINT OF MY BLOG AND YOUTUBE CHANNELis to unite believers to make Bible stories into great CG movies without watering down our source material and ultimately glorify Jesus.
If there's something I said that you don’t like or feel confused, please talk with me about it or ask me questions. Sometimes I just need to explain my thoughts more.
Thanks for reading this and please share your thoughts!
Hi, I just want to give you an update. I've been making youtube videos for the blog. I'm going to post content on my channel and share the videos here as well. It's not easy for me being on camera, but I think I need to share my voice and face and not just my words. I'll still throw in some visuals so it's not just my face. I hope by doing this that people will actually come together to make higher quality Christian animated stories. I'll post the link to my channel soon! Your prayers are much appreciated! Thanks!
I want us Christians to strive for higher quality animation and storytelling. It's Walt Disney's concepts that we should be adapting and applying to our animation. This article is pulled directly from Den of Geek. I also added a behind the scenes video from YouTube.
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In 2013, Walt Disney Animation Studios released Frozen,
its 53rd animated feature. With takings of well over $1 billion and
counting, it ranks as the most successful animated film of all time,
eclipsing the previous title holder (Pixar's Toy Story 3) by around $200 million.
For a generation who'd grown up with such films asThe Lion King and Tangled,
Disney probably seems like an immovable cultural force: as recognizable
and unchanging as Mount Rushmore or the American flag. But Disney
has survived a series of peaks and troughs since its founding in the
1920s, from its decline in the 1970s and early '80s, its revival in the
'90s, and its second burst of creative energy in the 2010s.
From its inception, Disney Animation Studios has moved with the
times, experimented with new technology, and taken creative risks. And
its first ever feature, 1937's Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, was perhaps the biggest creative risk of all.
Heigh-Ho...
One evening in 1934, Walt Disney got up on a recording stage in front
of an assembled group of his animators. Over the course of about four
hours, he went through the story of Snow White--the fairytale princess
who earns the hatred of her stepmother, the Evil Queen, and finds refuge
with seven dwarves who live in a forest.
Disney acted out the tale with his trademark enthusiasm before delivering a final, startling piece of news: Snow White And The Seven Dwarfswould
be a feature-length movie. This wouldn't just be a first for the
studio--which had spent the past few years making a string of highly
successful shorts--it would be the first animated feature film in the
world. Simply put, nothing like it had ever been attempted before.
Nevertheless, the belief Walt Disney showed in his 1934 presentation
proved to be infectious. Although initially taken aback by the thought
of drawing an 80-minute film to life, the animators were beguiled by
Disney's idea. "He was doing something no other studio had ever
attempted," art director Ken Anderson later said, "but his excitement
over Snow White And The Seven Dwarfsinspired us all."
"It took guts to do what Walt did," agreed animator Ollie Johnston.
"The story is based on the idea that the Queen is going to murder this
girl. That's one drawing killing another drawing. Walt convinced us that
this could be done so that it would be believable, and we all believed
him."
The rest of the Hollywood film industry remained skeptical. When word
got out that Walt was working on an animated feature, it was widely,
and smirkingly, described as "Disney's Folly." For Walt Disney,
branching out into features may have been risky, but it was also an
important progression. The studio's short films had continued to push
technical boundaries and win awards--the Silly Symphony piece, The Three Little Pigs,
won an Oscar in 1934--but the cost of making them was rising. The use
of short films as 'filler' was also beginning to fall out of favor in
theaters with double features taking their place.
All this led Walt to start thinking about taking the leap into
features. After a few false starts, such as when proposed adaptations of
Alice In Wonderland and Rip Van Winkle were considered, Disney pushed ahead with Snow White. The major question was whether audiences would pay to see almost 90 minutes of animation, with not a real human being in sight?
"It was prophesied that nobody would sit through such a thing,"
Disney later said. "But there was only one way we could do it
successfully and that was to plunge ahead and go for broke: shoot the
works. There could be no compromising on money, talent or time [...] and
this was at a time when the whole country was in the midst of a
crippling depression."
I'm Wishing
Indeed, finances would prove to be a recurring problem throughout Snow White's production. Walt and Roy Disney had initially earmarked somewhere between $250,000 and $500,000 for Snow White's budget--roughly 10 times the cost of a Disney short.
"We had a little money rolling in," Walt said, "but not enough to
finance such a big deal. Our assets were pretty impressive though--we
had our studio and a backlog of marketable pictures--so we could get
credit backing." This meant that Disney was literally betting
everything, including his own house, on Snow White being a success. If Snow White sank, the studio would be pulled down with it.
More worryingly still, the experimental nature of Snow Whitemade
predicting its budget extremely difficult. Although the project would
use many of the innovations introduced in Disney's short films, such as
the pioneering multiplane camera, which gave a sense of depth to a 2D
image, Walt wanted to bring a more realistic style to the movie.
"I had brought in specialists to help with our composition and our
use of color, but we still had a fight on our hands for better
animation," Disney told his daughter Diane, whose account was published
in a 1956 edition of the Saturday Evening Post.
"The kind of animation we were after was entirely new. Before that, it
had been done by stunts: limber legs moving in trick runs like egg
beaters. But in Snow White, we wanted our
action believable. We were after drama and pathos as well as laughter.
You can't pull a tear from an audience with legs whirling like
windmills."
To this end, Disney's animators practiced life drawing, and spent
hours, not to mention thousands of drawings, coming up with the look and
movement of their characters. Footage from the period shows Disney's
artists studying how a long, flowing beard might move at the shake of a
head, or how cloth billowed in the breeze.
"The first thing I did when I got a little money to experiment," Walt
explained, "I put all my artists back in school. We were dealing in
motion, movement, the flow of movement. Action, reaction. So we had to
set up our own school."
During this process, Disney's animators brought in live actors to
perform some of the characters' actions; these sequences - such as the
scene where Snow White and the dwarfs dance to the Yodel Song - were
filmed and then painstakingly traced by layout artist Ken O'Connor.
Although the proportions were changed in the final animated sequences,
the use of live actors resulted in some of the most fluent animation yet
seen.
Every stage of Snow Whitebrought up a new
technical or storytelling challenge. The look of Snow White changed
radically as the animators sought to get away from a stylized, Betty
Boop-like design to one more realistic and emotional. Likewise the
Dwarfs went through dozens of name and character changes before the
final seven--Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey--were
chosen. While casting around for voice actors, Disney had so much
trouble finding a suitable personality for Dopey that he simply gave up -
hence the character being silent in the finished film.
Even the formulation of paint required special consideration. According to issue 36 of Cinemagicmagazine, 1500 shades of paint were created over the course of several months.
Whistle While You Work
All told, Snow White required the work of
750 artists: 32 animators, 25 background artists, and 102 assistants,
and the creation of thousands of drawings. Unsurprisingly, the
commitment to quality and detail soon took its toll on the budget. And
as the three-year production went on and costs continued to soar, Walt
Disney began to worry about the possibility of making Snow White a success. "As the budget climbed higher and higher, I began to have some doubts too," he said.
There was worse news to come. The project was way over budget, but
the cash Disney had still wasn't enough. Roy Disney estimated that Snow Whitewould
need another $250,000 before it could be completed--thus pushing the
overall cost to a then exceedingly high $1.7 million. Clearly the bank
would take a great deal of convincing before it lent the production
anymore money, so Roy had a potentially risky plan: "I'm afraid you're
going to have to show the bankers what you've done on the picture so
far, Walt."
Despite his initial resistance, Walt knew that he didn't have much of
a choice. A private screening was duly arranged for Joseph Rosenberg,
the Bank of America's vice president, which amounted to an assemblage of
pencil tests and snippets of recently-completed footage.
Understandably, Walt was nervous; if Rosenberg was unmoved by what he
saw, he could easily refuse to hand over the extra money.
Throughout the screening, Disney tried to explain what Rosenberg was
seeing. "When we're through, that scene is going to be beautiful," he
said of a sketchy pencil test sequence.
"Uh-huh," Rosenberg replied.
"I sat alone with Joe Rosenberg of the Bank of America, watching
those bits and pieces on a screen, trying to sell him a quarter of a
million dollars' worth of faith," Disney recalled. "After the lights
came on, he didn't show the slightest reaction to what he'd just seen.
He walked out of the projection room, remarked that it was a nice day...
and yawned! Then he turned to me and said, 'Walt, that picture will
make a pot full of money.'"
What Disney didn't know at the time was that Rosenberg, still unsure as to how profitable Snow Whitecould
be, had rung around a few industry contacts in Hollywood. "What do you
think of this feature cartoon Disney's doing?" Rosenberg asked.
"I wouldn't put a dime in it if I were you," was one response.
Fortunately, one of the other people Rosenberg called up was
Hollywood producer Walter Wanger. Wanger told Rosenberg, "Joe, millions
of people are going to like it. If Disney does as well as I know he'll
do, they'll go for it."
A further ray of hope came from one WG Van Schmus, the owner of the
Radio City Music Hall in New York. He turned up at Disney's studio while
Snow Whitewas still being finished, and on the strength of Disney's track record, booked the film for his theater. "I'll book Snow White for the Music Hall, sight unseen," Schmus told Walt. "When can I have it?"
Some Day My Prince Will Come
From our vantage point in history, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs
looks and sounds so effortless and fully formed that it's easy to
overlook the effort that went into making it. Even today, the animation,
overseen by supervising director David Hand and designed by concept
artist Albert Hurter, positively sparkles with life. The songs, written
by Frank Churchill and Larry Morey, are timelessly catchy.
But the finished film only gives a hint at the enormous behind-the-scenes work that went into Snow White.
For every one of the roughly 362,000 cels that made it into the
finished film, there were thousands more drawings and tests that never
saw the inside of a theatre. Two sequences were conceived but later cut
from the production - one saw the dwarfs build a bed for Snow White, while the second was a musical number called "Music In Your Soup." These still exist in pencil test form.
The pressure of getting the film made meant that Snow White's
now familiar songs were recorded quite quickly. Adriana Caselotti,
immortalised as the voice of Snow White herself, was only at Disney's
studios for a few days. As she later told Cinemagic,
"All the dialogue and musical portions were done in a rather short
period of time, then there was a little dubbing to do after the
animation was finished. But I always felt very much a part of the Disney
family, even though I probably didn't work at the studio more than a
week or two."
Pressure continued to mount as Snow White's release date approached. Walt Disney's daughter Diane later recalled, "Dad says that while Snow Whitewas
fun, it was a ding-dong, photo-finish race with their budget. He was
running out of money, and still had a lot to do when his deadline loomed
up in December."
Layout artist Ken Anderson concurred. "Everyone was putting in
overtime to get the picture finished," Anderson said. "As I recall, the
print from Technicolor arrived at the theatre only a few hours before
show time..." With A Smile and A Song
Through sheer determination, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfsmet
its winter deadline, and held its premiere on Dec. 21, 1937 at the
Cathay Circle theater in Los Angeles. The response was little short of
rapturous. And as history records, Snow White would soon go on to become the most profitable film of all time. When adjusted for inflation, Snow White's gross of more than $1.7 billion puts it comfortably ahead of 2013's Frozen.
In risking so much when making Snow White, Disney not only established itself as a major force in Hollywood - paving the way for such future hits as Pinocchio, Bambi, and Dumbo- but also established the creative possibilities of the animated feature. Without Snow White, we wouldn't have modern hits like Tangledor Frozen, but it's also possible that we wouldn't have very different, equally boundary-pushing animated features, such as Akiraor Waltz With Bashir, either.
When Walt Disney took to his little recording stage in 1934, he carried Snow White from concept to completion through sheer belief and enthusiasm. In the process, he changed the face of filmmaking forever.
It's been a few weeks since I posted something, I'm working on more thoughts but at the moment I don't know when I'll get to them.
Right now I have a prayer request. Currently I'm out of work, I'm hoping to find work in motion graphics. Ideally if I could work from home that would be great since my wife needs to drive to work every day.
The video below is a pencil test from The Rescue Aid Society. Even though it's a mechanical process to time everything precisely, the characters still feel very lively, which makes you care.
