Insipid nativity animation with added talking animals

The Star

U cert, 86 min

★★★★★

Dir Timothy Reckart Starring Steven Yeun, Gina Rodriguez, Zachary Levi, Keegan-michael Key, Kristin Chenoweth, Tracy Morgan, Tyler Perry, Oprah Winfrey, Christopher Plummer

There are admittedly less promising ways to begin a retelling of the nativity than with a caption reading “nine months BC”. And it’s with that promising joke that we drop in on this seasonal CG cartoon from Sony Pictures Animation, which gives the birth of Christ the animals-with-celebrity-voices treatment.

The Star isn’t a badly made film, but it affects an air of irreverence it can never bring itself to follow through on, presumably for fear of coming off sacrilegious and alienating its target market. It promises something along the lines of The Lego Jesus Movie, or Cloudy with a Chance of Immaculate Conception. But what we get is a preachy and bland kind of ersatz fun – a little like those knock-off Christian video games from the early Nineties that mimicked existing hits, but which made you pray for people instead of shoot them. Intriguingly, the Jim Henson Company gets a production credit, but it’s impossible to tell for what.

Most of The Star is taken up with the not-strictly scriptural adventures of Mary and Joseph’s pet donkey Bo (Steven Yeun), who helps the narrative along by locating the stable himself, then mobilising a small army of wildlife to fend off the infanticidal thug sent out by Christopher Plummer’s King Herod.

Dave the dove (Keeganmichael Key) is Bo’s sidekick, while a singing horse (Kelly Clarkson), a pygmy jerboa (Kristin Chenoweth) and three bickering camels (Tracy Morgan, Tyler Perry, Oprah Winfrey) lend support.

Mary (Gina Rodriguez) has an authentically princess-like glow, while Joseph is so plainly modelled on Flynn Rider from Tangled that he is even voiced by the same actor, Zachary Levi. Director Timothy Reckart and his team make a reasonable fist of reproducing Walt Disney Animation’s current house style on a tighter budget, which is the only detectable creative brief.

As for the underlying message, “Do your best, give God the benefit of the doubt and it’ll all be OK” just feels a bit insipid for a medium that’s produced some of the most spiritually articulate films of recent times, from Anomalisa (on which Reckart was lead animator) to Inside Out. RC