David (2025)
Directed by: Phil Cunningham and Brent Dawes
Premise: An animated film based on the Biblical story. A prophet anoints David as the future king of Israel. As David becomes popular among the people, King Saul becomes jealous and protective of his throne.
What Works: Angel Studios specializes in wholesome faith-based entertainment. Compared to other faith-based production houses, Angel Studios has created better quality films and has generally embedded religious ideas within the drama instead of being didactic. David’s religious ideas are mostly overt but the filmmakers tell a compelling story. The narrative covers a long span of time. David’s famous showdown with Goliath occurs halfway through the picture and the second half of the story dramatizes David’s conflict with King Saul and the Amalekites. The second half of the film is stronger and it presents some complicated conflicts as David becomes close with the king and Saul behaves increasingly erratic, causing a crisis of allegiance. The story effectively makes David heroic; he’s repeatedly put in positions in which he has to make choices and David’s decisions define his character. The original scriptural source of this story is quite violent. The filmmakers sift that inherent violence through a family friendly filter and the results ought to appeal to the intended audience.
What Doesn’t: Adapting scripture into family friendly entertainment requires the filmmakers to make significant changes to the story. Some of this is aesthetic. The dialogue sounds very contemporary and there is a creative tension in the animation style. Some images are quite realistic but the character design is often cartoonish; the older characters’ heads are strangely shaped. David plays as a cinematic version of a children’s Bible and like those books, this film smooths over or omits the difficult parts of the original story. In that sense, David patronizes the audience. It does not trust them to make sense of the original story. And in simplifying the story, the filmmakers undercut the spiritual themes. The movie is intended to be inspiring but it doesn’t really do that. There is no wrestling with faith here. Spirituality is treated as an assumption and an afterthought. Simplifying this material to be inoffensive and family friendly paradoxically makes David downright pernicious. This film explicitly suggests that God favors one particular group of people, not because of their virtue but because of their allegiance and identity. That idea is at the heart of a lot of religion-inspired atrocities and telling this particular scriptural story at this moment, complete with the evil Amalekites, has political implications that are impossible to ignore.
Bottom Line: David will appeal to the faith-based audience and it works as intended. This is a family friendly tale of heroism. But in telling the story this way, the filmmakers have opted for simplicity that flattens the meaning of the source material and creates troubling political implications.
Episode: #1082 (January 11, 2026)