Whale of a story

Hopping, talking, singing vegetables are now the stars of an impressively computer-animated retelling of the Book of Jonah. The crisper characters of a popular video series make their feature film debut with the musical, message-laden Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie. While taking numerous liberties with its biblical source in the name of entertainment and enlightenment, this lively adventure lamely grinds gears as it shifts between the past and present. But, Jonah generally provides its target audience of youngsters enough stimulating eye and ear candy to make its moral medicine go down.

The story begins as the VeggieTales bunch heads to a pop concert with Bob the Tomato at the wheel of the van. Little Laura Carrot is incessantly gloating about the backstage pass she has won. Junior Asparagus thinks it’s a cut and dried case of divine intervention when the ticket flies out the window. “You’re just getting what you deserve,” he says. Or, is the stage just getting set for some Sunday schooling in compassion and mercy?

At the time, Bob is recklessly attempting to drive and read a map simultaneously, and he crashes the group’s vehicle through trees, underbrush and a clothesline draped with underwear to the edge of a body of water. The shaken food group avoids injury in the accident and enters a nearby rundown seafood diner to phone for help. The world’s laziest buccaneers, The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything, are sitting in a booth. They introduce themselves to their garden guests in song and then share a story about one occasion in which they actually did do something: They gave the conflicted Hebrew courier of God, Jonah, a lift in their ship.

The oft-told Bible story of Jonah (this time with Archibald the Asparagus in monocle and turban atop a long-legged camel) takes us along with the famed prophet as he spreads God’s word to the people of Israel. Then, one day, God wants Jonah to visit the wayward Assyrian city of Nineveh and tell the populace to quit their sinning (they lie, they cheat, and they slap each other with fish, we are told here). But Jonah runs from God, setting off a chain of events involving a storm at sea, a huge fish and, in this particular version, a blue half-caterpillar, half-worm salesbug who listens to self-motivational tapes on headsets and plans to market licensed Jonah plush toys.

Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie is not a fire-and-brimstone lecture but rather a humorous, elementary story (Jonah is referred to as Grumpy Pants) about giving and getting second chances. It talks about dereliction of responsibility, civility, and not knowing right from wrong. It wants the audience to walk away remembering that God loves everybody, not just them. In easily digestible song, the movie also drives home its advice to kids about how to live a healthy life: “Do not fight / Do not cheat / Wash your hands before you eat. Don’t do drugs / Stay in school!”

Highlights of the film include the suspenseful, exhilarating entrance of a gigantic whale that swallows Jonah for three days and three nights and then belches him onto dry land, and a rousing gospel number sung inside the whale by a choir in Afros, sleeveless white robes and sunglasses. There is also an odd, lengthy, silent pause as Jonah sits high atop a cliff overlooking Nineveh after its people have put down their mackerels and halibuts (I wasn’t kidding about the metaphorical fish slapping!). Jonah is waiting for God to punish the city, and directors Mike Nawrocki and Phil Vischer boldly take the risk of losing their audience here by letting the scene linger. The several scenes that unnecessarily clutter the film include a wanna-be comic incident with a power motor aboard the pirate ship vessel.

“You are huge. You are a celebrity,” says the caterpillar to Jonah. “The world doesn’t need people who are big. It needs people who are compassionate and merciful,” the film informs us later. The bottom line: Jonah was a prophet, but he really never got it. Ouch. That’s gotta hurt.