Joshua and the Promised Land (2004)

 I'm not going to sugarcoat this, Joshua and the Promised Land is extremely bad. It's ugly, it's grating, and the narrative framing makes little sense. And yet, for the duration of it's 54 minute run time,  I could not look away. If you have time to kill you can watch it for free on Youtube here. I'm warning you now, the ad breaks will feel like reprieves.

Moses speaking to god

 Written, directed, and animated by Jim Lion, Joshua and the Promised Land was released to the world in 2003 according to IMDB and 2004 according to Letterboxd. For context, the Incredibles came out in 2004. 

The Incredibles (2004)

 Also for context, Joshua and the Promised Land was mostly animated by Jim Lion alone over a 4 year span (source). 3D modeling was not nearly as accessible as it is today, nor were computers powerful enough to render complex 3D scenes. With that in mind, Joshua and the Promised Land becomes even more amazing and rare, a messy solo passion project!

Joshua witnessing Egyptians drowning

And what  a mess. I adore when artists take huge swings like this and fall so so short of the grand vision they clearly had in their heads, lacking in the technical skills or raw creativity needed communicate with their target audience. 

It's that lack of technical ability that makes these cases so compelling to me, as someone who also lacks technical ability. You don't labor for 4 years on a passion project about a story in the Bible that Veggie Tales covered in 1997 (in better detail), you do it because you're passionate. You do it because you believe, in yourself, in your vision, in your abilities. Millions of people have grand visions for movies, books, paintings, etc, but so few of those people even attempt to convey those visions, and even fewer complete them. Its a spectacle in and of itself that this was released to the world.

On a level other than the artistic failings, I'm fascinated by this as it's a telling of the myth that the Zionist project uses to lay claim to the West Bank. In the movie Joshua walks the streets of Jericho and leaves ready to condemn every man, woman, and child within the walls to death. The movie is literally unable to render violence in a shocking way, but it depicted this decision to kill so many people in such a matter-of-fact manner as to be shocking.

The citizens of Jericho are depicted as devilish red bulls

Given the generations of violence and ongoing genocide that have spawned from this claim to the land in Palestine and the Zionist project, the crude animation and childish framing of the story carries a tone of almost mockery, as if it was aware of how insane it is that this is the story used to lay claim to land and slaughter its native inhabitants en masse.

But I think I'm over intellectualizing this movie. At the end of the day it's a painfully bad animated movie on youtube that most people will never see. If you have an edible and an hour to kill I say go for it, it's more entertaining than another hour long video essay. I give it one star, but like it's a very glittery star.