Appropriately enough, Phil Cunningham and Brent Dawes’s “David,” based on the well-known biblical story from the books of Samuel, is punching well above its weight. Animated Christian films, like the direct-to-video DreamWorks production from 2000, “Joseph: King of Dreams,” or the recent “King of Kings,” tend to look pretty cheap, lacking the cinematic polish of big-budget cartoons by Illumination or Pixar.
But from the gleaming water running over a stone pulled from a stream to the fine bits of yarn woven into a tapestry on a loom, the details all throughout “David,” which was animated by the small Cape Town-based Sunrise Animation Studios, are surprisingly magnificent. It can be a preachy and po-faced movie, to be sure, but a handsome one.
I hesitate to criticize the source material, but “David” has a serious problem with plotting. The cherubic, unfailingly noble shepherd hero (voiced by Phil Wickham) faces and defeats the mighty Goliath (voiced by Kamran Nikhad) at around the 45-minute mark, and the remaining hour follows the somewhat meandering aftermath of David’s conflict with Saul (Adam Michael Gold), which feels like a long anticlimax.
Moreover, while David himself is exalted to almost “Burns for All Seasons” proportions, other characters are depicted as old-fashioned, borderline offensive caricatures, especially the mincing and flamboyant King Achish (Asim Chaudhry) and David’s overweight brother, Nethanel (Aaron Tavaler), who, in the face of danger, stuffs his face and cries, “Please not the food!” Such clichés, failures of imagination, are beneath a film that strives to be inspirational.
David Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.
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