Jonah: A Veggie Tales movie should only be the kind of fodder to show to kids who have gotten too bored with the boring Bible readings in Sunday school. But somehow, based on a recommendation from a friend (who sometimes leans towards the strange and abstract anyway), I watched the Veggie Tales movie and it is actually much better than should ever be considered. A first impression I had looking at the Veggie-Tales, even from afar, was that it looked like the healthy, slightly (only slightly) more coherent version of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which I am still mixed on. But it's a little different than that, at least as far as the movie goes.
It is ultimately very silly and marketed more for a specific target group of kids- Christian kids looking for morals in the stories of the Old Testament, in this case being the tale of 2nd chances taken and missed and slipped up on with a prophet via a giant whaler- and yet there is an appeal as far as taking less than two pages of the bible and making it into a 75 minute movie. And it actually works at being unpretentious in its less detailed CG animation in this form. This isn't Pixar that one will be getting, but a lot of very clean-looking talking vegetables (where are their arms, minus the caterpillar guy, you might ask), and with a lot of extra-goofy songs; one of them is even a gospel tune, sung by angels whilst Jonah is trapped in the whale's belly. All I could think watching this scene was "wow, what the hell, no pun intended, is this?" That was much of the reaction I had to what went on, and I even got a few genuine surprises through the story as I wasn't totally familiar with it all.
If there is any crossover appeal, aside for the parents in watching their kids having fun enjoying the coolest little figures out of cartoon-like abstractions, with creatures bouncy and bright and even very cute (those peas are about as adorable as Miyazaki creations, if less textured). It's nothing very special in the recent boom of computer animated features, but it's probably a whole lot less cynical (and maybe less cruel and sophomoric) than a lot of those films, and it is in a very oddly formed way almost brilliant.
