International (MNN) — Gospel workers, churches and ministries across the world will have a new tool in their hands before long. The Jesus Film Project’s fully animated film of the life of Jesus is underway even as the original 1979 film still reaches multitudes today.
“When people hear Jesus speaking in their language, all their defenses come down,” Chris Deckert with Jesus Film Project says. “Many missiologists are saying half of the world in most of the countries, are under 30 years old. We want to be able to have something that’s going to speak to that next generation too.”
Deckert says they’ve already seen God working through the difficulties of such a massive project.
Jesus unveiled in new animated “JESUS (2025). Photo credit of JesusFilm.org
“We’re using the audio tracks of our current JESUS film to guide the story of what the animated video is going to be. So when we do that, we can take all of our 2,200 languages and drop them into the animated version, so that those languages will have the animated version as well.”
Exciting innovation is coming from this project. The team is evaluating their translation and dubbing process. Some languages that they need to work in have very few believers, and yet “we need 26 voice actors to do a JESUS film,” Deckert says. That’s where AI may fit in.
“What if we could get into some of these languages where only one person dramatically voices over every single line, but we use nearby voices that AI takes and changes his voice or her voice to be the old woman sound or the young child sound?” Deckert says.
“We’re excited that [the new film is] pushing us into some of these directions of wanting to try out these new things.”
The animated film JESUS is coming soon to a theater near you. But before then, Deckert invites you to pray and see how you can help prepare the way to reach people.
“We want to have great groundswell of people ready to utilize this — developing the curriculum ahead of time, developing all kinds of contextualized follow-up materials so that it works with their areas [of the world]. So pray for those relationships now, those engagements that we’re having so that people are ready.”
Header image courtesy of Jesus Film Project.
