Just because it’s animated doesn’t mean it’s innocent.
Netflix’s latest offering, an animated Christmas movie geared toward families, makes a mockery of the nativity story in one scene garnering a lot of attention.
The film, “That Christmas,” marks Hollywood director Richard Curtis’ first foray into holiday movies since “Love Actually.” Just like the 2003 romantic comedy, Curtis wrote and directed this newest film and there’s one sequence in particular causing a stir among viewers.
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According to the brief Netflix synopsis, the new movie chronicles “an unforgettable Christmas” for the people of Wellington-on-Sea, a fictional seaside British town, where “the worst snowstorm in history alters everyone’s plans — including Santa’s.”
The movie centers on a ragtag group of kids, all led by a rebellious teenager named Bernadette. At one point in the film, the children come together to put on a school Christmas production written by a couple students who feel the biblical nativity story is too antiquated for modern culture.
When Bernadette introduces the program, she describes Jesus as “a cool dude” with a beard and long hair and “into woodwork,” calling him “a hipster basically.”
“He wouldn’t have wanted us to do the same boring Christmas story year after year, right, parents?” she asks rhetorically to the crowd gathered in the school’s auditorium. “He’d want a strictly vegetarian, multi-cultural fun fest with lots of pop songs and stuff about climate change.”
As the program unfolds, viewers see the shepherds herding vegetables rather than sheep, and the wise men from the scriptural narrative are replaced with three wise women.
The most egregious part of the production, though, comes when the young girl playing the role of Mary, Jesus’ mother, sings, “Papa Don’t Preach,” a 1986 Madonna song about deciding whether to have an abortion. The girl sings as she’s hoisting a watermelon with a face carved into it, intended to represent baby Jesus. At one point, another student accidentally knocks the watermelon out of the girl’s hands and it falls to the ground, splattering onto the audience.
When Bernadette asks some adults for their thoughts on the program post-show, they agree it was not very good. One adult tells the teen, “I don’t think Jesus and jokes go together, dear.”
You can watch the scene in question in the video above.
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