THERE will be those quarrelling about how much Noah’s Ark: A musical adventure (Cert. U) departs from the biblical story. This is to ignore the universality of Flood myths and the view that Genesis 6-8 owes much to earlier Mesopotamian sources prevalent at the time. Unlike its predecessors, in the scriptural account there is a single deity involved, as is the case with this animated version. Likewise, while God sorrows over humanity’s chaotic and mendacious behaviour, the Ark gives creatures a new start. The Ancient Near East texts lack any such moral dimension. The gods are a vengeful lot.
That said, this new take on Noah does part company with the Hebrew Bible in several ways. A couple of resourceful mice, Vini and Tom, are stowaways on the Ark. They overhear God telling Noah to “Just figure it out” how to save a male and female couple from each species. All very well; but it soon becomes apparent that this Utopian vision, in which Baruk the lion shall lie down with the lamb, won’t succeed. On the contrary, the carnivores’ prodigious appetites threaten that scenario.
It is a cue for the mice to avert disaster. Music is their weapon of choice to defeat the stronger beasts’ tyranny over the humble and meek. Given that the songs were written by the authors of “The Girl from Ipanema”, none of the numbers is all that memorable. They serve, however, to postpone imminent doom by persuading Baruk to participate in a concert.
It soon becomes clear that the film’s Brazilian director, Sérgio Machado, is employing humorous antics to make ethical points about climate change. He also castigates spiritual wickedness in high places, which denies basic human rights to others. Some theological questioning underlies the whole piece. A youngster criticises God’s lack of “wokeness”, asking whether the Creator is “out of it” when it comes to confining selection to heterosexual couples. “What about other kinds of families?” If anything, the film overdoes the contemporary relevance of the Ark. Characters take selfies, send texts, click likes, use TikTok, have followers, etc.
More seriously, this graphic tale doesn’t pay any heed to its literary origins, where the flood story becomes a parable of God’s grace. It is more akin to Evan Almighty (2007), in which sole individuals change the world. We would need to look in recent times to films such as Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (Arts, 4 April 2014) to perceive God moving from judgement to mercy and grace, recognising and/or bestowing such qualities in Noah himself. In the book of Genesis, people, despite catastrophic experience of the flood, seem to have learned nothing about improving human nature. Yet God goes on forgiving them, seeking to make an everlasting covenant in a rainbow society.
Marilynne Robinson, in her recent study of Genesis (Books, 5 April), notes how its authors, albeit by means of a borrowed narrative, portray the nature of evil and God’s reaction. Primordial stories never really end, she says. Rather, they define the terms of everything that follows in human history: God’s purposes forever being frustrated, while he yet maintains a love that will not let us go.