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What's the deal with Veggie Tales? Scott posted a link roundup which included a article about the relationship of its characters with Jesus.
I took a look and the cartoon looked like ass. Why would anything like it be something people know/care about? Was it the only cartoon children in fundy families were allowed to watch? Surely there are other options, I remember watching Superbook as a kid and it was not this offensive to my senses.
Turns out there's the new 3D Superbook, and it looks like an ad for a mobile game, that's the most flattering thing I can say about it. Are there no Christian animators left?
A good part of Veggie Tales specific look is due to the time it started: the first videos came out in 1993 using CGI animation common to the time, where their competition was stuff like Reboot. At the time, they weren't amazing, but the gap between VeggieTales and more mainstream media works were a lot smaller. While they've done some improvements as graphics have advanced, they've always been fairly cautious -- even reverting Bob and Larry's more Pixar-looking appearances after the Netflix series got mixed responses in 2015.
Most of the show's selling point is the surreal humor and decentish songs, rather than art direction or its non-confrontational nature. There's absolutely a lot of Christian- or ex-Christian people who will recall the Song of the Cebu, the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, or the Hairbrush Song. I think there's a post-Netflix revival, but I'm pretty far removed from that culture now and from what I understand it's more aimed at teens and tweens.
SuperBook has similar problems: the CGI series started in 2011, and it was competing against shows that basically were game and toy ads. Here, the gap was bigger from day one given how much was getting poured into the best on the field, but even they struggled a lot.
There have been more recent Christian media, including from animators with more 'mainstream' support (eg, the Animal Farm CGI movie came from a company normally doing religious flicks, and I'll give the necessary pun about missing the underlying material here), but there's far less crossover from the Christian world to the rest of it, especially in the last five years. I only know about the Pilgrim's Progress movie because of some parents for a STEM outreach program were talking about it; they think it's good, but it's not really something that would even show up in my world.
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