What Faith-Based Animation Gets Right — And What's Still Missing

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MarkTheHerald.com

✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦

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I spent years in the world of animated children's content, and it taught me something that I find myself returning to constantly as I think about the future of MARK! The Herald Angel: the difference between content that families watch once and content that families return to every year for the rest of their lives.

That difference is not production quality. It's not budget. It's not even the sophistication of the

animation.

It's whether the story has been built with the same care and intentionality that the best stories — in any medium — are always built with.

Faith-based animation has made enormous strides in the past decade. There is more of it, it is better funded, and it reaches larger audiences than at any point in the history of the genre. And yet I think there's a conversation worth having about what it still gets right and what it still tends to get wrong.

What the Best Faith-Based Animation Does Right

The best faith-based animated content — and I'll include Auto-B-Good in this category, as well as more recent productions like Minno's library and some of what Angel Studios has done — succeeds for the same reasons that secular animation classics succeed.

It creates characters that children genuinely love. Not characters that teach correct lessons — children can smell a lesson delivery system from three episodes away and they will not return to it voluntarily.

Characters that are interesting and funny and specific and surprising. Characters that feel like friends rather than instructors. It tells stories that operate on multiple levels simultaneously. The surface story engages the children.

The deeper story gives the adults something to think about. And at least occasionally, the two layers converge in a moment that lands for everyone in the room at the same time.

It takes the source material seriously without being slavish to it. The best faith-based animation treats Scripture and Christian tradition as genuine stories with genuine dramatic potential, rather than as pre-existing lessons that the animation exists to illustrate. The story comes first. The theology follows from the story, the way that good theology always follows from genuine encounter.

It earns its emotional moments. This is where the category most often falls short, so I want to be specific about what earning them looks like. It means the character work that precedes the emotional payoff is sufficient. It means the audience has been given enough time with the character to genuinely care what happens to them. It means the moment of transformation or revelation or grace has been built toward, brick by brick, from the first scene.

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What Faith-Based Animation Still Needs

Here is what I think the genre still needs more of:

Stories that don't announce their themes. The best Christmas special you've ever seen probably did not begin with a character explaining to another character that they were going to learn something important about the true meaning of Christmas. The theme emerged from the story. It was discovered, not declared.

Characters with genuine flaws that the story doesn't immediately and neatly resolve. Real

transformation takes time. Real characters are complicated. Content that presents a problem in act one and solves it completely in act three, with a clear moral articulated at the end, is teaching children that faith is a problem-solving technology rather than a lifelong encounter.

More humor. I mean real humor — the kind that is funny to adults as well as children, the kind that earns its laughs through character and situation rather than slapstick. The funniest moments in A Charlie Brown Christmas and Klaus are funny to everyone in the room. That's not an accident and it's not luck. It's craft.

I believe MARK! The Herald Angel has the bones of the kind of animated Christmas special the genre still needs. A reluctant, grumpy, deeply specific little reporter who loses all his pencils and finds a song.

If that doesn't work in animation, I'm not sure what does.

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