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S4C and Christmas Films

Testament: The Bible in Animation

Nine half-hour Bible stories — Creation and the Flood, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Ruth, David and Saul, Elijah, Jonah, Daniel — each made in a different animation technique by a Welsh and Russian co-production. Puppets, paint-on-glass and cel animation, one style per story.

ProvisionalFamily & childrenInterdenominational
Where to watch

Why this is listed

It refuses the two things that ruin children's Bible animation: an invented child sidekick, and a comic tone. The scripts stay close to the text, the visual style changes to suit each book, and it won an Emmy for doing so. Nothing made since has treated these stories with as much visual seriousness.

Before you press play

Noticeably darker than American children's Bible animation and deliberately so. Creation and the Flood shows the world drowning; David and Saul includes Saul's madness and his death; Daniel plays the furnace and the lions' den straight rather than cute; Elijah handles the slaughter after Carmel obliquely but does not leave it out. Best from about nine. There is no framing narrator and no invented modern character, so a younger child gets the story with nothing between them and it.

Suited to Older children. Age judgements are ours, not a rating board’s — you know your own family.

How to start

  1. Open s4c.cymru (opens an external site) and read what S4C and Christmas Films says about itself before you read anything else.
  2. Read the note above first. It is there so an evening does not go wrong twenty minutes in.
  3. Watch it yourself before you watch it with children, if there are children.
  4. Read the passage it dramatises alongside it. The point is to send you back to the text, not to replace it.
  5. Afterwards, ask what the story added and what it left out. That conversation is worth more than the film.

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