The Synopsis:
An epic journey, faithfully adapted to modern day, Christian faces distractions, challenges, and perils at every turn of the way. But he ends victorious, with helpful guides, as he stays on the narrow path to the distant Celestial City.
The Review:
John Bunyan’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress from 1678 has received a feature-length, animated treatment via Fathom Events. In the film, like the original story, a man named Christian Pilgrim discovers a book that convicts him of the necessity to leave the City of Destruction in search of something better. He journeys out of the city, encountering friends and foes along the way. Will he ever arrive where he should be, or will he find himself doomed by the pitfalls along the way?
Creatively imagined and wonderfully animated, the story audiences will watch includes fantastic elements of adventure and peril as Pilgrim progresses in starts and stops toward the Celestial City. Pilgrim is not always the brightest of heroes: he regularly gets derailed by his own accord and also struggles to overcome the various traps he experiences along the way.
Pilgrim meets the Evangelist (John Rhys-Davies) who saves him several times throughout his journey, providing steady advice that Pilgrim sometimes takes and sometimes forgets. But he must first push through to a place where he can get rid of the burden on his back, here visually imagined as a giant bag he must carry. We can see several steps of faith: first he finds the book (or rather, says the Narrator, it finds him); then he must leave his old ways behind and lose his burden of expectations from the past, etc. Ultimately, he will meet Hopeful, and find his way to carrying out a life of faith that can be modeled for others.
Much like The Chronicles of Narnia, the parable here has glorious visuals and ideas brought to life in an imaginative way. But it is more direct in its sentiments, thanks to the names for people and places—which is clearly the intention of producer Steve Cleary—because the film is intended directly for evangelical use as a means of sharing discipleship.
