MONTREAL — The era of primitively animated biblical cartoon films – with their cheap production values, “flat” look and stultifying scripts – appears to be coming to an end.
Montreal-produced Young Abraham is set to usher in a generation of slick and sophisticated “direct-to-video” CGI (computer-generated imagery)-animated Jewish biblical films that will “not repeat the same stories over and over again,” says executive producer Oliver Cohen.
Three years in the making at a cost of $1.8 million, Young Abraham uses not only the Bible itself, Cohen says, but tales from the Midrash – the “oral Torah” – to give new texture, depth and meaning to the age-old story of mankind’s first Jew.
The target audience is not just Jewish kids of all ages. The film will also find an audience among adults and non-Jews who will readily identify with the universal story of a “hero among heroes, one that we can all relate to,” he says.
“The idea was, really for the first time, to bring the Torah to life,” says Cohen, 38, who worked in the clothing industry before “jumping into the movie business.”
The finished, 50-minute featurette gets its premiere March 8 at 7 p.m. at the Imperial Theatre at a special fundraising screening to benefit Yeshiva Yavne in Cote St. Luc.
Cohen’s aim was to get away from the renderings seen in previous, conventionally animated fare like The Prince of Egypt and The Ten Commandments.
He worked with co-executive producers Moshe Dayan and Sidney El Hadad to form a company called Bible Kids Club. They then decided to make their direct-to-video DVD using the latest in digital animation technology while coming up with a story that would genuinely enthrall viewers.
To write the script, they hired Ron Mezey, a veteran of the L.A. film industry now living in Montreal, as a producer and writer, while the main writing was done by Jacob Potashnik, who worked on Denys Arcand’s Les Invasions Barbares and was engaged through Quebec’s Société de développement des entreprises culturelles. Zvi Hershcovitch has the story and research credits, while Israel Bernath and Yitzchak Bitton served as consultants.
Coming on board as director was Todd Shaffer, with longtime experience as a director of live-action and animated fare, while the video itself was produced and animated by Montreal’s Big Bang Digital Studios.
A synopsis of the story is found on the website, youngabraham.com. The infant “Abram” is born on the same evening as King Nimrod’s chief stargazer sees a small star in the heavens consume four larger ones, its rays shining down on the home of the king’s general, Terach.
Terach’s wife, Amaslal, gives birth to Abram, whom the astrologer predicts will threaten Nimrod’s kingdom by going “against the gods.” King Nimrod demands that Abram be handed to him, but Terach gives him another baby while Amaslal flees into the wilderness with her infant Abram.
As he grows up in the wilderness, Abram comes to believe in the one “Creator God” and seeks a wise man to teach him about God. To do that, Abram, now 13, returns to Nimrod’s kingdom in Ur Chasdim, where idolatry prevails, even among his own family.
The rest of the story vividly chronicles Abraham’s difficult quest to bring monotheism to the world as he resists Nimrod’s efforts to stop him, finds his wise counsel in the land of Canaan and witnesses God addressing his own people’s “wickedness” in the struggle to have the belief in one almighty God prevail.
Besides the March 8 event, Cohen says, the Young Abraham DVD is being marketed through direct sales from its website and is currently “looking for distribution” at retail outlets like Wal-Mart. It is also being translated into French, Spanish and Hebrew.
Work has already started on the next project, Young King David, which should be finished within a year, Cohen says.
“I think we are taking it to another level.”