It’s not uncommon for animated movies about Jesus to tell their stories from a child’s perspective. The Miracle Maker—for my money, still one of the best Jesus movies in any format—is told partly from the point of view of Jairus’s daughter. Light of the World, which comes out later this year, focuses on Jesus’ relationship with John (the youngest disciple, according to tradition), who is depicted in the film as an “ordinary boy.”
The King of Kings, an Angel Studios release opening this week, also puts a child protagonist front and center, though it comes at the gospel from a rather different angle. Instead of highlighting a child from the first century, it presents the narrative as told by 19th-century writer Charles Dickens (voiced by Kenneth Branagh) to his young son, Walter (Jojo Rabbit’s Roman Griffin Davis).
There’s a historical basis for this framing device. Dickens—famous for novels like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and A Tale of Two Cities—also wrote a book about Jesus called The Life of Our Lord, which he read to his children every Christmas. Dickens refused to publish this one. Indeed, it was so personal to his family that the book—which was written in the 1840s—wasn’t published until after the last of his children died in the 1930s.
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The King of Kings is different from The Life of Our Lord in some ways. But the central conceit—a father tells a story to his son—allows the film to approach the story of Jesus, even its darker parts, in a child-appropriate way. The dialogue between Charles and Walter—especially the fact that Walter can interject with the occasional question—allows the film to explain details big (What’s the Passover?) and small (What’s a manger?) that might otherwise fly over the heads of younger viewers.
The basic beats are all here: the birth of Jesus (voiced by Oscar Isaac), his childhood in Nazareth, his visit to the temple when he was 12, his baptism by John the Baptist, some of his more famous miracles, and finally the events of Holy Week, including his death and resurrection.
At times, Walter and his father stand apart from the story, discussing it from the safety of Charles’s study or watching from a distance within the first-century setting. At other times, they take part in the action, sometimes to comic effect—as when their cat, Willa, gets lost in the crowd—and sometimes in ways that bridge the gap between then and now, as when Walter, eating some biscuits that his mother (Uma Thurman) has brought to the study, imagines handing them over to one of the disciples. The biscuits turn into the fish and loaves with which Jesus feeds the multitude.
Despite the focus on Dickens and his family, the film—directed by Seong-ho Jang and produced by Mofac Animation, a South Korean visual-effects studio—doesn’t owe a whole lot to Dickens’s book. It often fills in details that Dickens left out, it emphasizes a different set of themes, and it is even more theologically orthodox (more Christian, one might say) than the original text.
One of the biggest differences is right there in the movie’s title. The real Dickens says very little about Jesus being a king in his book; when he uses the word, he is usually talking about one of the wicked Herods. But in the film, Walter is obsessed with stories about King Arthur, so Charles decides to tell him a story about the true King of Kings. The script is full of lines about the kind of king Jesus was: one who was humble, one who served his people, and so on.
The film is also more candid about the encounters Jesus had with Satan and the demonic world. While Dickens does say that Jesus prayed for 40 days in the wilderness, he leaves out the Temptation, and he tends to talk about the “madness” of the demoniacs Jesus healed rather than the spirits that tormented them. The film, on the other hand, deals with these stories frankly—and cleverly, too, conveying the demons’ presence through small tornado-like dust clouds. The Charles of the film makes a point of saying that Jesus resisted temptation “using only the Word of God.”
The film also emphasizes faith in a way the book never does. The Charles of King of Kings says Jesus performed miracles not just “for the sake of miracles” but “to prove the power of faith.” He even says the demons obeyed Jesus because they “knew that Jesus was the Son of God and they knew how strong his faith was.” (Some viewers might wonder how accurate it is to say that Jesus had faith; how one answers that question will presumably be affected by how one reads passages like Hebrews 12:2.) And in the film, Jesus himself tells his disciples, “Have faith in me and be saved.”
That said, King of Kings doesn’t improve on The Life of Our Lord as much as it could have. Dickens wrote about the Jews of Jesus’ day in a way that reflected the prejudices of his age, and while the film corrects some of his errors (it is much clearer in the film that it was the Romans, not the Jews, who crucified Jesus), its depiction of the Pharisees as one-dimensional villains plays into old stereotypes, however unintentionally.
Overall, though, the film is impressive, and creatively so. The framing device, in which Charles tells the story of Jesus to young Walter, allows children in the audience to see themselves in Walter even as he sees himself in the people whose lives Jesus touched. The virtual cinematography is dynamic and expressive, and in certain key sequences— as Charles explains the origin of Passover or the reason Jesus died for our sins—the film puts its regular computer animation on pause and communicates its ideas through lightly animated Gustave Doré–style woodcuts.
The script, written by Jang with an assist from Rob Edwards (The Princess and the Frog) and Jamie Thomason, includes the odd Bible-geeky detail, like when the twelve apostles are introduced and one says to another, “Hey, your dad’s name is Alphaeus too!”
And the voice actors are well cast: especially Kenneth Branagh, who brings his masterful, sensitive approach to the part of Dickens, and Oscar Isaac, who got one of his first big breaks playing Jesus’ earthly father, Joseph, in The Nativity Story and now strikes just the right note of compassionate authority as Jesus himself. (Other cast members include Mark Hamill as Herod, Forest Whitaker as Peter, Ben Kingsley as Caiaphas, and Pierce Brosnan as Pontius Pilate.)
The film makes one other theological tweak to Dickens’s book worth noting. The Life of Our Lord harps on the idea that if people are good, they can go to heaven and even become “bright angels” there. The main point of Jesus’ ministry, as Dickens saw it, was to teach us “to be better” so we could go to heaven when we die. (Dickens even seems to embrace a form of adoptionism—the belief that Jesus was a purely human person who was “adopted” by God at some point in his adulthood—when he says that Jesus himself was “so good that God [loved] Him as His own Son.”)
The film, on the other hand, puts its ultimate emphasis on the Resurrection and makes clear that the beginning of salvation is not just at some point in the future but in the here and now. “We’re alive again because he is risen,” says Charles. Amen.
Peter T. Chattaway is a film critic with a special interest in Bible movies.
