More on Noah's Ark

Following on from Friday's post about Noah's Ark there's also an official website and blog for the film. There's not a great amount of information up there at the moment, apart from the following synopsis:

To build an ark for all the animals, God chose Noah. To lead them to it, God chose... Gilbert?!?

Gilbert the Groundhog loves Caroline with all his heart. That's too bad for him, because Caroline plans to marry into the upper crust of groundhog society, and Gilbert dwells in the deepest, dingiest tunnels a groundhog can dig. That is, until they start to flood!

When a pair of very special doves warns Gilbert of the troubles to come, nobody in the burrow will listen. To get Caroline away from those groundhog snobs and on the road to safety, Gilbert tells a teeny tiny lie. Of course, lies don't stay little for long! Two-by-two, a menagerie of kooky, crazy animals begins to follow them. Day-by-day, the journey grows more perilous. Pretty soon, Gilbert finds himself leading a rowdy zoo of birds and beasts and all kinds of critters through deserts and jungles and much, much worse...

...all because he told a lie. Now, the storm is come. The waters are rising. All these animals want is to run wild and free, but soon there won’t be any place left to run to. Gilbert had better quit digging himself into a hole, because it takes a hero to lead his friends all the way to Noah's Ark!

Two thoughts spring immediately to mind. Firstly, If the hero is Gilbert the Groundhog, then who is the pink hippo in the above photo (taken from the website's only image at the time of writing)? Secondly, it seems a little strange to me that this synopsis suggests that lying is good and God's plan. It could be argued that there is some kind of biblical precedent for this, for example the Jacob story, but this kind of message is likely to repel the kind of faith groups who would otherwise be those most likely to watch a film based on the Hebrew Bible.

Meanwhile a growing number of articles have been posted at the blog. Some of these are fairly trivial such as the Dove foundation's report on the script - it praises "the theme of believing in one's self". How very original. (That's for Dove not the filmmakers / bloggers by the way)

On the other hand there are a number of interesting discussions of the film's approach to the Bible or examines the medium of animation (such as Sculpting in Virtual Space). It's good to see this level of discussion about a film at this stage in its production, and I'd encourage them to keep it up.