SUNDAY MORNING VALUES, SATURDAY MORNING FUN:

VeggieTales Take Plunge With Big-Screen 'Jonah' (MICHAEL MALLORY, October 2 2002, LA Times)

"Jonah--A VeggieTales Movie," drawn from the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, is the company's first theatrical feature and the first film to be released under Artisan Entertainment's FHE Banner Pictures banner. It features the standard VeggieTales cast--Larry the Cucumber, Bob the Tomato, Archibald Asparagus, Pa Grape and a gourd named Mr. Lunt--and the characters still espouse Judeo-Christian values, although in a manner more closely resembling John Cleese than John Bunyan.

That combination of moralizing and satirizing has caught on with parents, who have made VeggieTales a multimillion-dollar franchise with more than 30 million videos sold. "Jonah" was intended to be one of those videos, but when work began on it in 1998, it quickly became clear to Vischer and Nawrocki--who is the film's co-writer, co-director and much of the other half of the voice cast--that it could not be contained within a half-hour or 45-minute video.

"Mike settled on a 'Titanic'-like story device [Jonah's story is set in biblical times but is framed by a second, modern-day story], and he started writing it, but when he'd hit Page 17 he still hadn't gotten to the story of Jonah yet," recalls Vischer. "I said, 'Where are you going with this, Mike?' and he said, 'I'm having fun!' So we thought, 'OK, maybe this wants to be bigger.' "

It goes without saying that the script deviates from the biblical tale, and not simply because the title prophet is played by an asparagus. In the film, Jonah's companions include a turbaned half- caterpillar/half-worm named Khalil, a deadpan camel named Reginald, and three bush-league buccaneers Pythonesquely called the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything.

What's more, the decadent citizens of Nineveh, Jonah's ultimate destination, lie, cheat, steal and hit each other in the face with fish. There is also a roof-raising gospel number set in the belly of the whale.

This is huge if you have kids. The videos are consistently excellent and very funny.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 5, 2002 7:06 AM