VeggieTales Take Plunge With Big-Screen ‘Jonah’

Phil Vischer, executive producer, co-writer, co-director and about half the voice cast for “Jonah--A VeggieTales Movie,” is a man who practices what he preaches. When Vischer learned several years ago that two Christian bookstores--the primary distribution outlet for the faith-based, computer-animated VeggieTales video series--had pooled their resources to rent a movie theater and had charged admission for people to watch the latest VeggieTale on the big screen, he did not threaten to unleash a pack of lawyers. He forgave, and then he got an idea.

“We called them and pointed out that this was just a little bit illegal, and asked that they donate any profits to charity, which they did,” says Vischer, whose Chicago-based Big Idea Productions Inc., formed with Mike Nawrocki, a friend since Bible college days, has produced “VeggieTales” since 1993. “But then we got to thinking that this was kind of an interesting little grass-roots idea.”

Big Idea began sanctioning such theatrical premieres of new half-hour videos, and when one event in Florida drew an audience of 16,000 for two screenings one Saturday morning, Vischer knew the stage had been set for producing a full-length feature film.

“Jonah--A VeggieTales Movie,” drawn from the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, is the company’s first theatrical feature and the first film to be released under Artisan Entertainment’s FHE Banner Pictures banner. It features the standard VeggieTales cast--Larry the Cucumber, Bob the Tomato, Archibald Asparagus, Pa Grape and a gourd named Mr. Lunt--and the characters still espouse Judeo-Christian values, although in a manner more closely resembling John Cleese than John Bunyan.

That combination of moralizing and satirizing has caught on with parents, who have made VeggieTales a multimillion-dollar franchise with more than 30 million videos sold. “Jonah” was intended to be one of those videos, but when work began on it in 1998, it quickly became clear to Vischer and Nawrocki--who is the film’s co-writer, co-director and much of the other half of the voice cast--that it could not be contained within a half-hour or 45-minute video.

“Mike settled on a ‘Titanic’-like story device [Jonah’s story is set in biblical times but is framed by a second, modern-day story], and he started writing it, but when he’d hit Page 17 he still hadn’t gotten to the story of Jonah yet,” recalls Vischer. “I said, ‘Where are you going with this, Mike?’ and he said, ‘I’m having fun!’ So we thought, ‘OK, maybe this wants to be bigger.’ ”

It goes without saying that the script deviates from the biblical tale, and not simply because the title prophet is played by an asparagus. In the film, Jonah’s companions include a turbaned half- caterpillar/half-worm named Khalil, a deadpan camel named Reginald, and three bush-league buccaneers Pythonesquely called the Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything.

What’s more, the decadent citizens of Nineveh, Jonah’s ultimate destination, lie, cheat, steal and hit each other in the face with fish. There is also a roof-raising gospel number set in the belly of the whale.

By the spring of 1999, the script had been completed and the songs composed (mostly by Vischer, Nawrocki, Kurt Heinecke and David Mullen), but Vischer decided the studio was not quite ready to tackle a feature. Production did not begin until mid-2000, by which time the company had produced 15 VeggieTales episodes.

By then, key creative personnel from the big animation shops had joined the 100-member Big Idea staff in Chicago, including story supervisor Tim Hodge, who came from Disney’s studio in Orlando, Fla.; producer Ameake Owens, who came from DreamWorks; and executive producer Dan Philips, who had worked in computer imagery for Disney and DreamWorks.

“One of the things that Ameake and Dan brought to the table was putting this film up in front of the company and getting reactions to it,” Nawrocki says. “Normally, Phil and I would go in and write a script and then produce it right from the script, with the storyboards very close to what you saw on the written page. But we put this film up on story reels and critiqued it, rewrote it, changed the ending and changed things in the beginning and the middle to make the ending make sense. All that was new to us.”

The decision nine years ago to create a cast of vegetables with no limbs, hair or--in most cases, clothing--was a major part of what enabled the Big Idea team to produce a half-hour of computer-generated animation, which prior to VeggieTales had never been done in the U.S.

By using such simple characters, Nawrocki says, “we could really concentrate on the emotion of the body language and the animation of the eyes, though our animation director, Marc Vulcano, will tell you that being able to emote with a limbless vegetable is sometimes harder than having all the limbs to work with.”

Going from home video to the big screen, however, meant revising the simplistic character designs.

“The big changeover on the aesthetic side for production design and art direction was to maintain the style of these characters that all the fans like, but to increase their visual complexity so that when we have a close-up or medium close-up on the big screen, it’s more interesting to look at,” Philips says.

The “Jonah” cast includes many more incidental characters than in any of the videos, as well as scenes that include 700 veggie extras.

Studios specializing in computer-generated imagery frequently write their own software for various phases of production, but for “Jonah,” only Maya 4.0, bought off the shelf, was used. Streamlining the software pipeline was one way of keeping the budget for the independently produced film to roughly $15 million.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference for fans of the videos is in the film’s lighting and texturing, which is added after the basic character animation. Outside help had to be recruited for the lighting phase to keep the film on schedule.

While previous Christian films such as the G-rated “Joshua,” and the more apocalyptic PG-13 “Left Behind” and “Omega Code” series, have met with conditional mainstream success, FHE and its parent company have pulled out all the stops in promoting and marketing “Jonah” to a wide audience.

“It is by far the most extensive promotional campaign this company has ever had, including our release of ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ ” says Amir J. Malin, chief executive of Artisan Entertainment. In addition to the expected tie-ins with church youth organizations and Christian and country radio stations, there are promotions with Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurants, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, Safeway Stores and Papa John’s Pizza.

FHE will release “Jonah” on 950 screens on Friday, with the intent of expanding to 1,500 two weeks later. Although the release is nationwide, the target markets have been carefully chosen.

“We are not devoting our initial release strategy to the Northeast of the United States,” Malin says. “When you look at the demographics of the VeggieTales series, pockets like New York, Boston and many areas of the Northeast do not have a large and devoted fan base. But the Midwest, the South, the Southeast and the central West are extremely strong components.”

Which raises the question: Can a film that, in today’s marketplace, is still considered a niche picture break through with the kind of splash created by “Shrek”? Or, perhaps more pertinently, by 1998’s “The Prince of Egypt,” DreamWorks’ animated retelling of the Moses story, which grossed more than $100 million domestically?

Vischer, for one, has faith. “Yes, it is a niche,” he says, “but it’s a huge niche; it’s the mother of all niches.”