Digital Evangelism Issues

You may have already seen cartoon stories online from Xtranormal, without knowing their source. This website enables you to place your own computer-generated characters into a mini story! It looks cool. Why not try it? It could even be used evangelistically.

There are limitations, especially the speech – which is computer generated from your typed script. If you have the software to do it, you could create the cartoon, download it, then wipe off their recording and dub the dialog with your own recording equipment and a drama group. This could be a fun project for a youth group to try, for instance.

Suggested guidelines:

• it will only be as good as your dialog – a boring story and wooden characterization will be just that
• don’t get your cartoon characters to preach at each other or the viewer, or end up apparently ‘repenting’. It will be cringeworthy. Think ‘Peanuts’ – humor, touching whimsical stories, real characters that your viewers can identify with. Aim at leaving a question in the viewers minds, rather than blasting them with answers.

Please send URLs of videos you make, and we can feature them!

If it gives you a taste for animation and cartoons, visit
Comix35,
who offer training in cartooning and animation.

Animation is a wonderful artform. You may not be familiar with the anime cartoon art-form from Japan, but these films have become increasingly popular in the West, through the work of film-makers such as Studio Ghibli providing films with an English soundtrack. Check, for instance, Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky or Spirited Away. In anime, there is touching combination of thousands of years of Japanese story-telling tradition and worldview, with the familiar universal themes of story-telling. Redemptive themes abound, along with the frequent assumption of a spiritual realm, giving us ideal starting points to use for evangelism.

Watch a Studio Ghibli trailer of films ranging from 1984 to 2005 (Nausicaa to Howls):