David

The Weight of the Sling

I've always been struck by what happens when ancient scripture gets repackaged for kids. The blood gets washed off, the jagged bits of human failure are trimmed away, and suddenly there are songs. It's odd work. When DreamWorks put out *The Prince of Egypt* in 1998, it somehow kept a real sense of divine terror while still feeling marketable enough for the toy aisle. That balancing act kept coming to mind while I watched *David*, the new animated feature from director Phil Cunningham and Angel Studios. This is not merely another Sunday school flannel board with better lighting. Or at least, it is trying very hard not to be.



Cunningham has been carrying this project for three decades, sparked in part by time spent canoeing down the Zambezi River in Africa. You can feel that scale in the way the film builds its world. The landscapes don't feel pasted in; they feel alive. When we first meet young David (voiced with an earnest, cracking warmth by Brandon Engman), he's tending sheep in a place with real texture. Dust lifts around his sandals. Sunlight drifts through olive branches with that thick, late-afternoon gold. Then the film makes a telling choice. In the biblical text, David shows his strength by killing a lion and a bear. Here, he saves the flock but ultimately helps the lion out of a trap.

I don't think that softening quite lands. (Though I get why no one wants to traumatize a theater full of six-year-olds.) By reshaping the shepherd into a kind of ancient Judean pacifist, the script sands away the ferocity that makes his stand against Goliath believable in the first place. *Sounds of Cinema* recently noted that the film "smooths over or omits the difficult parts of the original story," and argued that it sometimes talks down to its audience. That feels right to me. Once you clean up the violence of the Bronze Age, you also lose some of the story's deeper urgency.



Still, when the movie leans into sheer visual scale, it comes alive. The approach to the showdown with Goliath unfolds in the Valley of Elah, which the animators cover in millions of vivid red poppies. It's beautiful and a little unnerving. Those crimson petals move in the wind like a field already haunted by blood. Against that hyper-real environment, some of the character designs feel like they wandered in from another film. A few of the older men, Saul especially, have exaggerated, top-heavy cartoon features that clash with everything around them.

And yet, look at the way Saul moves. The animators really understand his body. As paranoia takes hold, his shoulders inch upward toward his ears. His motions get twitchy and abrupt, like he's batting away things no one else can see. He seems to shrink under the crown while David, loose and unguarded, sits and plays the lyre. The bodies are doing more storytelling than the dialogue.



Maybe that's the real problem with turning someone as unruly and enormous as King David into a two-hour family movie. The darkest and most recognizably human parts have to stay off-screen. We don't see the warrior soaked in blood or the king brought down by his own moral collapse. We get the boy with the sling. Even so, there's something quietly affecting in watching that child stare into a huge animated sky, sing into the dark, and believe someone might hear him. It isn't a flawless film. But it leaves behind a small, steady warmth, and sometimes that's enough.