At The New Yorker, The Prophet, Animated

At The New Yorker, Brook Wilensky-Lanford writes about Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, an animated film translation of the worldwide poetry bestseller that premiered this past Friday in New York and Los Angeles. The project was initiated and produced by actor Salma Hayek, a longtime fan of Kahlil Gibran's work. "It wasn’t about enlightenment, she told Variety, but about her Lebanese grandfather: 'To me, when I see the cover, I cannot think of anyone else but him.'" More:

Many Americans of [director Roger] Allers’s generation who have read, given, or recited “The Prophet” ’s words likely do not know, or at least do not care, that its long-dead author, Kahlil Gibran, was born in what is now Lebanon. (His home in Besharri was, at the time of his immigration to the United States, still part of Greater Syria in the Ottoman Empire. Gibran died in New York City, in 1931, at the age of forty-eight, of cirrhosis of the liver.) Many of the teen-agers and college-age young people who discover the book may prefer to see it as a timeless guide to existential questions, like a Ouija board or the “I Ching.” Attaching this amorphous wisdom to a specific author, with his inevitable human foibles, would just be a buzzkill.

Nevertheless, Lebanese and Arab-American advocates for Gibran have long sought to enhance his literary and cultural reputation...

But how to translate poetry into a plot-oriented movie?

Since the book itself doesn’t really have a plot, the filmmakers decided to create one in order to link together the different poems. That larger plot is about a rebellious young girl and her struggling, widowed mother (voiced by Salma Hayek), whose accidental encounter with a poet called Mustafa (voiced by Liam Neeson and loosely based on Gibran), changes their lives for the better. The setting of the story, as in the book, has mostly been blurred of distinguishing details, and the people have the rounded, two-dimensional features of old-fashioned Disney animation. But the hapless soldiers who guard the mountain cabin where the poet is under some kind of house arrest wear fezzes and refer to someone called a “pasha,” which makes them seem like Ottoman-era Turks. The mountain country looks vaguely like a cartoon Lebanon.

The story line takes place on the day of Mustafa’s release, and so the soldiers usher him back down from the mountain to the sea, where he will return by ship to his unnamed homeland. At every step he encounters something that inspires a poem—a family celebrating a wedding, a person selling food, a lively debate, and so on. Abruptly, each time, the narrative stops, and a new swirl of imagery appears—in watercolor, or Claymation, or a wash of finger paint—often with background music that makes the words, in a rather hurried voiceover, seem incidental.

Inviting animators with styles that differ wildly both from one another and from the visual style of the main story line, could, I suppose, serve as a tribute to the book’s long history and varied interpretations. But the animations start to feel repetitive as the movie progresses; each bit of poetry interrupts the story in the same way...

Find out more at The New Yorker.