After seeing The Star, I was not at all surprised with the typical production values of Sony Pictures Animation. Yeah its a pretty good follow up from the world's longest and most abysmal and unnecessary phone advertisement from earlier this year (You know what I'm talking about), but its still not a good film. We have a small donkey named Bo who yearns for a life beyond his daily grind at the village mill and one day he finds the courage to break free, and finally goes on the adventure of his dreams. On his journey, he teams up with Ruth, a lovable sheep who has lost her flock and Dave, a dove with lofty aspirations and embarrassing comic relief. Along with three wisecracking camels and some eccentric stable animals whom have no reason to exist except their only redeeming factors are they are voiced by A-list celebrities unlike the rest of the cast, Bo and his new friends, for some reason, become accidental heroes. There's absolutely nothing that stands out about this film because not only is this a story we have heard millions of times, but there are other films that have executed a better job at producing the animal version of The Nativity story such as Disney/Don Bluth's The Small One and the really weird and creepy but charming Rankin & Bass's Nestor The Long Eared Christmas Donkey. The film isn't as effective as it is supposed to be, because Mary & Joseph rely too much on the coincidental cartoonish animal rampages so they can get out of scary situations. The CGI animation is not bad at all, as the human characters look good whenever we have a chance to see them. The animal characters, when they're supposed to behave like the loony tunes, move too stiffly which can be a detriment to when providing comic relief in this movie. To those whom are having their "It's not a Pixar movie so it doesn't have to be good!" rant, I can't really expect Sony to be Disney and Pixar at all because none of their films are as good and charming, well maybe except Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and Hotel Transylvania (and I really do hope that Popeye turns out fine in the future if they ever get a chance to work on it), but I really do expect Sony to put time and effort into making good animated movies with small budgets, something that Illumination has done a much more sophisticated job of doing this lately. And to those who have their "It's a Christian movie so it doesn't have to be good" rant, I've seen better Christian movies than this. I recommend DreamWorks' Prince of Egypt (although its not a Christmas movie and this was when DreamWorks SKG use to make the best animated movies at the time) although its old, but it still hasn't lost any of its charm and nostalgia yet as I shall continue to wait for a theatrical release of a Christian Christmas movie that will turn out better than most Santa flicks.
--- (9th December 2017) From looking at the likes to dislikes ratio on my review, as of today, 1 out of 7 people found it useful. Now for all the triggered SJWs who rated my comment down (and no I am not sorry for this review and won't change my words and rating!), just because this film has Jesus in it, doesn't mean its automatically a good film. It's like adding Jesus as a comical cameo to an episode of South Park and calling South Park the number 1 best Christian TV show in the world. After producing many bad films in the past, I believe Sony Animation still has a chance to produce good movies if they ever bother to do so in the future.
