‘David’ Is the Best Animated Bible Movie Since ‘Prince of Egypt’

Faith-based film and television’s improvement is by now a well-known, welcome trend. I no longer find the majority of the genre embarrassingly bad. Yet faith-based masterpieces are still rare. And when one comes along, it’s a beautiful surprise.

David might not be a “masterpiece,” but it comes close. Distributed by Angel Studios, the film (in theaters December 19) is certainly the best Bible-themed animated musical since DreamWorks’s Prince of Egypt (1998), and arguably more biblically faithful and artistically rich.

The movie blew my expectations out of the water and had me smiling, laughing, and occasionally tearful over the course of its 115 minutes. I took my 7-year-old son with me to the advance screening, and he loved it too. Is David perfect? No. But as family-friendly animated biblical epics go, it’s one of the best I’ve seen.

How ‘David’ Came to Be

David is the passion project of Zimbabwean Christian couple Phil and Jacqui Cunningham, who founded Sunrise Animation Studios, now based in Cape Town, South Africa. A project the Cunninghams have been dreaming of for over three decades, David comes with a lot of lead-up and hype, including well-publicized legal fights between the David producers and Angel Studios.

Angel understandably sees the project as its next blockbuster on the level of Sound of Freedom, which is why the Utah-based media company fought so hard to secure David’s distribution rights (which for a brief time belonged to The Chosen’s 5&2 Studios). Last year, Angel even boldly predicted that David would become the highest-grossing animated film of all time. Probably not, but we’ll see.

One record David already holds is that of the largest audience-funded film project of all time, having raised nearly $50 million via crowdfunding. Between this grassroots momentum and a 2023 TV series prequel (Young David), it’s safe to say anticipation is high for David’s Christmas-season release. Will families turn out en masse to make David a box-office hit? I hope so.

Impressive Artistry

I was skeptical going in, recalling the last Bible movie musical I saw—2023’s cringey Journey to Bethlehem, which flopped at the box office. Yet from David’s first minutes, it’s clear this film is several cuts above in quality.

The animation is spectacular. Earlier this year, I praised the old-school, two-dimensional, ’90s-style animation of another 2025 Bible film, Light of the World. But the highly detailed, almost photorealistic computer animation in David is next-level good. On several occasions, I marveled at a particularly elegant shot, jarring angle, or frame composition: David’s reflection in Goliath’s sword, for example, or a close-up of Samuel’s anointing oil dripping from David’s head down his young cheek.

When Goliath thunders onto the scene for the first time, it’s as cinematic and iconic as you’d hope. My son’s eyes were wide. It’s all epic in scale, “prestige” quality on par with Pixar. If this is the quality we can expect from the Cunninghams’ Sunrise Animation Studios, I’m eager to see what they do next.

It’s all epic in scale, ‘prestige’ quality on par with Pixar.

The music’s artistic quality is also refreshingly good. Movie musical songs have to be good to avoid cheesiness, and for the most part, the songs in David—some written by Grammy winner Jonas Myrin—impress. The central anthem, “Follow the Light,” is a catchy single sure to rack up the streams. A scene where David “auditions” to be Saul’s court musician features a lovely song about shalom, which calms the anxious king.

I was especially impressed by “Tapestry,” which you can watch and listen to below. The song introduces a key theme and visual motif in the film: understanding the tapestry of God’s will and “trusting the Weaver” when we don’t know what he’s doing in and through our lives. Fittingly, “Tapestry” and most of the other songs on the soundtrack weave lines from the Psalms (I heard Psalms 8, 23, 27, 121, 139, to name a few) in beautiful and seamless ways.

The film’s music is elevated by the presence of Phil Wickham, who voices older David in the film (young David is voiced by Brandon Engman). Wickham is one of contemporary Christian music’s strongest vocal talents, and he’s perfectly cast in a movie as music-forward as David is.

Refreshingly Not a Disneyfied David

Artistically, David looks like a top-tier Disney animated movie. But what about its storytelling? Early in David, as young David sings about freedom, I worried that the script might go the Disney route of expressive individualism and “find yourself” empowerment. Thankfully, it doesn’t.

As much as the film is a coming-of-age, hero’s ascent story, it refreshingly avoids making David a navel-gazing, “finding himself” character. Rather, the film (co-directed by Phil Cunningham and Brent Dawes) portrays David as a humble servant, dutiful son, passionate worshiper, and “man after [God’s] own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14). He doesn’t want to be king and yet never hesitates to lead when God asks him to. Both strong and tender, he’s got “the heart of a lion, but the spirit of a lamb.”

The movie traces his journey from shepherding sheep as a boy to shepherding God’s people in his adulthood. Through it all, he’s a shepherd who both loves his sheep and fiercely protects them from threats. It’s never about him. It’s about what he can do for God and others.

Does the film take liberties with the biblical account (and chronological sequence) of David’s life? Yes. But none is theologically problematic, and only a few are bothersome. I didn’t like that in the scene of David rescuing his sheep from the attacking lion, he doesn’t kill the lion as Scripture reports (17:34–36) but rather spares the lion’s life. Perhaps this is meant to parallel the later scene when David spares Saul’s life (1 Sam. 24), but it feels like a sanitizing move in an age when killing animals is more taboo in kids’ movies than almost anything else.

The film portrays David as a humble servant, dutiful son, passionate worshiper, and ‘man after [God’s] own heart.’

Overall, though, the PG-rated David doesn’t sanitize the story. Goliath is genuinely scary, and his rock-to-the-head demise is a mic-drop moment (though we don’t see his head being chopped off). Saul’s mentally erratic behavior isn’t sugarcoated, and his tempestuous relationship with David is rendered in dramatically charged but faithful ways.

The Amalekites are foreboding and, for younger viewers, probably the scariest characters in the film. The movie’s climax shows the Amalekite raid of David’s camp at Ziklag, and David’s subsequent defeat of the raiders (1 Sam. 30). It’s a genuinely thrilling but also inspiring sequence—with a rousing song about trusting God’s protection and not being afraid.

2025: Hollywood’s Year of David?

It’s been a good year for David stories on screen. House of David launched on Prime Video to solid reviews and big streaming numbers. I’ve written about it favorably. Already in season 2, the show’s more PG-13 take on 1 Samuel is veering a bit too much into Rings of Power–style spectacle. While the series does a good job capturing the Shakespearean family drama of the Saul and David story, I worry it might lose some of the story’s joy and theological poetry amid epic battle scenes.

The David story shouldn’t primarily draw our attention to David and the drama of his life; it should make us think about God—and worship him. David does that. It’s reverential to God and rife with subtle nods to Jesus, the “shoot from the stump of Jesse” (Isa. 11:1), the true and better David. It’s a movie that uses the colorful tapestry of David’s life to showcase the beauty, goodness, and grace of the Weaver.

So take your family—especially if you have younger kids—to see David on the big screen over the holidays, and let it be a springboard for conversations not just about David’s heroism but about God’s glory.