Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet – that's the full title of this animated book adaptation – wavers somewhere between transcendent wisdom and preachy self-help baloney. It can be either; it can be both simultaneously. At its best, the animation in the film is genuinely beautiful and imaginative.
Lebanese writer Kahlil Gibran is supposed to be the third most-read poet in the world, just behind Shakespeare and the Chinese poet Lao-tzu. His book, The Prophet, was read by nearly every self-respecting hippie in the 1960s, maybe because for many young readers it was their first experience with the idea that the entire world is metaphorical. Gibran is a great believer in purity of thought and action – that whatever you do, you must do with clear thought and without compromise.
In the movie's version of the story, which is not strictly Gibran's work, Mustapha is a poet who has spent seven years under house arrest in a Middle Eastern country not his own. He's about to be freed and sent back to his home, but must journey with his jailors to the port where a boat waits. On the way he meets people who revere and celebrate him. Each encounter leads to a great outpouring of wisdom on fundamental subjects like love, death, work, good and evil.
If you're 18 – or maybe 13 – Mustapha's wisdom has currency. If you're older than that, it may sound like romantic stuff you've heard before, and you might find Mustapha tiresome. But the imaginative power of what you see on screen can be strong enough to unwrap the cynicism – at least some of it.
The beginning is a little toothache-cutesy. A mischievous little girl, Almitra, voiced by Quvenzhané Wallis, the young star of Beasts of the Southern Wild, steals a pastry in the market, runs across the rooftops and frustrates the adults, especially her mother Kamily, voiced by Salma Hayak (who also produced the film). The character gestures look canned and superficial.
Almitra is so saccharine-impish, it feels like you're on Disney turf. But once Almitra and her mother go to the home of Mustapha (Liam Neeson), the film opens up. As the journey to the port develops, each section has its own animator; the styles change, and it's often lovely.
The part on parents and children is animated by Nina Paley, who made the sweet and biting Sita Sings the Blues in 2008. Her piece opens in black and white, with shapes that look like the first cells dividing in a womb and also like developing mandalas. The circles grow into a line drawing of a tree that sprouts leaves – still in black and white – followed by Indian-style silhouettes of mythic figures in profile, and then color begins to seep in. First a red ball, then a child's blue head with a bird inside it, and finally the whole screen explodes in colors that shift and change and dance around the black and white silhouettes. It takes your mind away from Mustapha's persistent wisdom, which over the course of the picture grows pretentious with that Liam Neeson voice sounding awfully sure of itself.
It's lucky that most of the animation avoids being too literal, that it has a life of its own beyond illustrating Mustapha's speech.
Paley draws an archetypal drama of a child growing up with precise figures with crisp edges. Other sections of the film are more abstract with broad swaths of color that look like the wind blowing and circling as the colors morph. The movie is astonishing at the same time that it's also self-righteous. For all his preaching about love and awareness, Mustapha is unrelentingly serious. The character doesn't laugh; he radiates a somber joy that doesn't invite you to be joyous – it commands it.
But Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is film, what you see can trump what you hear.
