The Star (2017)

The Star arrives as a 2017 animated retelling of the Nativity, narrated largely from the perspective of a donkey named Bo who escapes a mill, befriends a dove, and stumbles into the greatest story ever told. The voice cast is unusually starry for a faith-based children's picture, drawing on Steven Yeun, Gina Rodriguez, Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, and Tracy Morgan, among others. The characters they inhabit are animals and first-century Hebrews, so the diversity registers as a casting decision and little more. Nobody in Bethlehem remarks on it, because nobody in Bethlehem is asked to.

Where the film shows faint signs of a modern sensibility, it does so quietly. Mary is granted a moment of interiority, admitting her fear about the child she carries. The camel Deborah and the sheep Ruth are competent and self-directed in a story that could easily have sidelined them. This is characterization, not argument. The miller who owns Bo is grasping, and King Herod is a greedy tyrant, but both are stock villains whose appetites serve plot mechanics. Zach the goat is hyper and paranoid because the star keeps him awake. His bulging eyes are a running gag, not an invitation to think about anything.

The film's religious messaging is gentle and delivered through slapstick and chase sequences, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. There is no engagement with race, no environmental concern, no queerness, no body affirmation, and no revision of the scriptural record. It presents the Nativity with straightforward reverence and asks the audience to enjoy one camel bickering with another. That is a modest ambition, honestly executed. The result plays as a competent holiday product for a specific market, sincere in its devotion and untroubled by the cultural questions of the decade that followed. It wants to be liked, and it is, by the people it was made for.