By Anand Holla
While watching Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, you realise you don’t have much time to marvel at the delightful spectacle unspooling before your eyes. The cavalcades of animation, as compelling as they are, only serving as a medium to loyally translate the wisdom brimming in Gibran’s poetry.
That partly explains why you must watch this film, at least, twice – once for the eyes, once for the mind.
Breathing new life into one of the best-selling poetry books ever and reimagining its thoughts and messages in various moments of creative clarity, The Prophet is a rare cinematic achievement that would have made Gibran proud.
Using vignettes that explore musings on life, love, death, and everything in between, the film is a spectacular confluence of art, philosophy, literature and music. Director Roger Allers (The Lion King) skillfully helms the project, but the distinct animation styles of eight top animators in the business are what make it special.
Set in the fictitious Middle Eastern island of Orphalese, the narrative follows a mischievous young girl Almitra (voiced by Quvenzhané Wallis), whose mother Kamila (voiced by Salma Hayek, also the film’s producer) has an awful time handling her.
When Almitra follows her housekeeper mother to work, she happens to meet poet-writer-artist Mustafa (voiced by Liam Neeson), who the State has locked up in a villa over his supposedly subversive material. Mustafa is offered freedom but with strings attached.
The express purpose of this framework though is to carry the eight thought-stirring chapters realised by the animators: On Love by Tom Moore, On Freedom by Michal Socha, On Work by Joan Gratz, On Children by Nina Paley, On Marriage by Joann Sfar, On Eating and Drinking by Bill Plympton, On Good and Evil by Mohammed Saeed Harib, and On Death by Paul and Gaëtan Brizzi.
Each time Mustafa tells stories of inspiration and self-discovery inspired by Gibran’s text, the audience, through Almitra, is lulled into a world which brings these evocative chapters to life. The effect is quite unlike anything else we are so used to seeing. The swirls of animation will most likely draw you into a contemplative trance, a quiet place where you can unwind and reflect.
Not only does this narrative approach work well, but it sure trumps a conventional treatment that would have severely limited the film’s visual scale. How else can one cinematically present a beautiful but complex thought as this, from On Love: Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; for love is sufficient unto love. And think not you can direct the course of love; if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
While the words take you on a trip, the varied animation styles enrich the film’s visual atmosphere. In the chapter On Work, Joan Gratz’s incredible clay-painting – a technique that won her an Oscar for Best Short Animation in 1993 – gets images to flow seamlessly, hypnotically, while Tom Moore makes fine use of Islamic motifs to bring On Love to life.
The driving storyline of The Prophet is kid-friendly, but the take-offs into the thoughts may not be. It’s not that the children won’t get it. However, despite its endearing simplicity in explaining the ideas and messages, a lot of kids may not be able to grasp all chapters due to the sheer range of thoughts covered.
Conversely, the story of Almitra and Mustafa, laced with a few funny bits, may be fun for the kids, but for the grown-ups, it’s mostly the eight chapters that they would look out for. That’s also because the host storyline doesn’t answer an elementary question – Why do the authorities of Orphalese keep Mustafa, a political prisoner, confined in a decent villa where he writes and paints for years together, when, for them, he is so easily dispensable? The climax seems a tad abrupt due to this point.
Save for that minor hiccup, The Prophet is what you get when you maximise the ambition and vision of animation and allow it to just run free with imagination. This is perhaps why the film almost feels like stepping inside a beautiful mind.
And that holds true across ages. It makes the grown-up get genuinely interested in reading or re-reading Gibran’s book The Prophet, while it gently taps the child and opens his or her mind like no other children’s film has been able to do in a very long time. For that one thing alone, The Prophet is compulsory viewing.
(Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet made its Mena premiere at the closing day of the Ajyal Youth Film Festival.)