Movie Review: The King of Kings

 

Michael's Movie Grade: B+

A delightful, animated family film. 

With season 5 of The Chosen in theaters, The Last Supper on its way out and Light of the World coming to theaters later this year, I fear that this delightful family film about Jesus' life may be overshadowed by the flux of Jesus films this year. I hope that I am wrong about this though as this movie is a sheer delight. This movie is loosely based off Charles Dickens' short story, The Life of Our Lord, a story that Dickens created for his children and was not published until 64 years after his death. With this in mind the story of Jesus is framed with Charles Dickens telling the story to his son. This is not only a framing device as soon the great writer and his son become a part of the story. This framing device is what makes this movie so delightful. The film asks us to see this story that we all know from the point of view of a child who has never heard it before. Because of this we get to emotionally experience this story as if for the first time. The ways that our narrators get involved with the story also leads to a lot of fun and fresh moments that put a smile on my face. The bits of slapstick humor, while never laugh out loud funny did add a real childlike charm. Speaking of childlike charm as this movie is aimed at kids and focuses on a man telling the story to a child, this is a simplified version of the story (like in those kid bibles). Yet despite this it never talks down to its young audience, instead treating them with the utmost respect. 

 This movie also a big-name voice cast with many prominent movie stars. While for the most part, I am not the biggest fan of this practice (as I often would prefer to hear cartoon voice actors), it works fairly well, and I never once stopped and thought about these characters being voiced by big movie stars.

This film does have one big flaw though. This movie runs 1 hour and 50 minutes. This is simply too short of a time to tell Jesus' life, especially when his life doesn't take up the whole runtime. Because of this, the film feels like an overly condensed version of the story with many story points feeling rushed. 

A delightful movie for the whole family.