Divine Animation: Bringing Jesus and his story to life

Premise Entertainment, an animation studio in Orlando, Florida, is working on a forthcoming animated remake of the 1979 film “Jesus.”

Director Dominic Carola and his team are dedicated to historical accuracy, researching details like the architecture of first-century homes, colors of shadows in the Holy Land, ethnic diversity, and period-accurate clothing.

The animated Jesus is set for release in 2025 and aims to tell the greatest story ever told in 90 minutes. The film plans to use existing audio translations but will not be a shot-for-shot remake, incorporating animation to enhance storytelling.

The team is also careful in depicting Jesus, seeking global Christian feedback on skin color, nose shape, and hair texture. The project is seen as a way to use animation to reach new audiences with the gospel message, with potential future developments in virtual reality or augmented reality encounters with Jesus.

The animated film promises to be an intense and involved process but is driven by the goal of impacting people’s lives.

Christianity Today reports:

Hair isn’t the biggest problem. But it is a problem when you’re trying to animate Jesus and the 12 disciples plus the Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and all the people in the crowds in the gospel story.

“Maybe we could make them all bald!” joked Dominic Carola, director of forthcoming animated remake of the iconic 1979 Cru film, Jesus.

“It’d be so much easier if these were clean-shaven people,” he said. “But we can’t do it! That’s not how it was, and we’re leaning into historical accuracy.”

Carola and his team at Premise Entertainment have, in fact, spent so much time on the historical details of the biblical story that their animation studio in Orlando, Florida, has sometimes looked like the world’s nerdiest Bible study.

They’ve done research on the difference between the second floors of first-century homes in Jerusalem and Capernaum. They’ve looked at the exact hue of the colors of the noonday shadows in the Holy Land, the ethnic diversity in the area at the time, and the way the layers of period-accurate clothing would fall on a person’s body.

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