B-SIDES #6 | Joshua and the Promised Land (2004)
Every now and then, Montage highlights an underseen piece of media in a series called B-Sides. There are no set parameters for what “underseen” might mean—don’t worry too much about the prompt. Thank you!
Joshua and the Promised Land (2004) | dir. Jim Lion | 53 min.
Watch on YouTube …I really think you should watch this one.
A young lion named Joshua journeys back in time to witness the trials of Moses and the Israelites, learning to cope with his troubled home life along the way.
It’s no secret that I cherish sincerity. My favorite filmmakers are the Wachowskis and Hayao Miyazaki. Small talk makes me sweat, literally, because it feels like playing pretend. I’ve written at length before about my strange and undying love of gonzo Christian music, and about the difficulty I had finding footing in New York, where no one’s ever laughing. My love language is Quality Time and nothing else comes close. I think Robert Zemeckis’s Here has its merits. Etc.
Part of this, I think, can be traced back to my soft boy childhood; I was quick to cry, confused about divorce, in the mix with a bunch of sisters—think Sammy Fabelman without the talent. It helps, too, that sports never really interested me and where I gravitated instead was to punk rock, one of the more sincere art forms that has ever sprung from humanity. Punk was born from the need to say something without the skill to say it well, so it’s no surprise it hooked me the way it hooks so many teenagers, famously some of the most unskilled people on earth. I was too old for emo when emo really hit—and I’m eternally grateful for that—but emo became a scene and no scene is earnest anyway. Ben Gibbard’s a millionaire now and MCR’s a clown troupe with expensive pedals. I worshipped open wounds like Kurt Cobain, of course, but also the legendary outsiders he often championed: Wesley Willis, Lucia Pamela, Shooby Taylor, the Shaggs. Like me, they had something to say but not the means to say it—unlike me, they went and said it anyway.
I’ve been drawing invisible threads between punk and Christian ethoses (ethi?) for most of my life, shepherded in large part by friends I made in high school who made the ties for me and handed them over. These were religious friends, Christian and Catholic, which made me an outsider within a group of outsiders—I went to church as a little kid, but sporadically and without fervor, stopping gradually and then all at once as soon as I was old enough to take a stand. For 25 years now I’ve identified as an “apatheist,” a truly stupid word I made up to describe the way I don’t care about god one way or another. I’m open to anything existing or not existing, and generally speaking it doesn’t affect my life and I don’t ever think about it. Which I guess is why some of my favorite songs and albums and bands are overtly Christian: Half-Handed Cloud, Free Flying Soul, Only Visiting This Planet, Danielson Famile (for my money one of the most creatively invigorating American bands in history), to say nothing of Sufjan Stevens’s whole thing. I think I’m uniquely attuned to Christian artists especially because we’re not spiritually aligned—I just go gaga for the experimentation, the earnestness, and the very punk rock dedication to getting a message across above all else and no matter what. And no one will do whatever it takes to get their message across like a Christian will (for good, I mean, but often obviously for much, much worse).
Am I trying to say that Joshua and the Promised Land is punk? I don’t know that I would go that far—but if you pressed me, I’m not above saying it’s pushing the same blocks around. Joshua and the Promised Land was produced, directed, written, edited, narrated, and most importantly animated by Jim Lion, about which very little is known besides that he lives in LA and self-publishes what seem like perfectly normal self-published novels. His Twitter account has not been updated since 2015; the Go Daddy personal website his account links to has long since expired. He’s been on one podcast that I can find, where he talked to a bunch of deeply religious teenage boys (??) about the wacky legacy of Joshua and the Promised Land (they’re nice to him, which I appreciate; Jim seems like a totally ordinary boomer). JATPL is about 50 minutes long and took four years for Lion to make, a note he includes after the closing credits that made me weirdly emotional:
It is not a good movie—it’s important that I say this, because what I’m going to say about it from this point on might make you think I think it is. I know it is not. It’s what you might generously call an “unsuccessful” picture: ugly to look at, wooden in its characterizations, stilted and bizarre in its plotting. Fine, OK. It’s bad. We got that out of the way.
What do we want out of a self-made movie anyway? A vision would be nice; a voice is even better. Something unique and magnetic, an ineffable energy that captivates and delivers on the promise of having something urgent to say—if none of this, then it should at least be fun. I’m always charmed, too, when a movie was so clearly made first and foremost for the person making it, and Joshua and the Promised Land is definitely that, or some version of it. In fact I’d say it has all of the above in spades. When you’re watching it, you can’t look away; you can’t imagine what could happen next, or what it will look like, or how the director will choose to tell it. There’s a purple narrator who freezes scenes to pop in and add his two cents, at one point opening a door out of the image on screen like a “That’s All Folks!” for Jesus freaks.
There’s also sidekick/Virgil type who’s clearly the same character template as the narrator but white and sparkling—not confusing at all—and he has a tough-love menace to him that sometimes our main character, a young lion (??) named Joshua, responds to and other times seems frightened of. Moses is an olive green monochrome monkey. The rest of the Israelites are different animals with no rhyme or reason to their assignation: a tiger, a zebra, something hot pink and unrecognizable. All of them are terrifying in the way unfinished Shrek designs are, or smooth Mike and Sully without fur or eyelids. The whole vibe of the movie is like what if the Red Sea split straight through the uncanny valley.
In fact, journey with me if you will through some of what Joshua and the Promised Land looks like:
Did you ever watch the ‘90s Canadian CGI cartoon ReBoot? I was obsessed with it; I think it came on in the morning before I went to school every day. It was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen, and it looked like this:
That’s what Joshua and the Promised Land reminds me of, but worse—and in that way, of course, better. Jim Lion didn’t have the resources or the skills to make it, but for four years he felt that it was worth making. It’s hard to stick with something on your own for four years! I’m not saying “things are always good when someone spends a long time on them,” which is not true and sometimes actually the opposite of what is true, but to watch a passion project fail so grandly that it basically comes back around to succeeding by sheer brazen bizarreness gets to me. It really does. I, too, would like to make things that I have no skill to make, and why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t anyone? Some day it’s just going to go up on YouTube or Bandcamp or Substack or whatever and then you’ve done it: you’ve made the thing. And there it is. And if it’s hideous or boneheaded or deeply unsettling, you can move on anyway. You already are! Look at you go; your next self-published novel about the sons of Abraham time traveling to modern day Seattle or whatever comes out next week. I won’t be reading it, but I’m glad you made it all the same.
i hated looking at this thanks (but i do feel tenderness toward anything made with no resources and a lot of heart)