The Star (2017)

The pitch for The Star is so obvious it's a minor miracle nobody made it sooner: retell the Nativity story from the point of view of the animals. Not the shepherds, not the Magi, not Joseph and Mary in any meaningful sense. The donkey. His name is Bo, he's voiced by Steven Yeun, and he wants to be part of the Royal Caravan more than anything in the world. The fact that his journey to that dream ends in a manger in Bethlehem on the most consequential night in Christian history is, for most of the film, a coincidence he hasn't figured out yet.

That premise is both the movie's greatest strength and the source of all its awkwardness. When it works, it creates genuine comedy from the gap between the animals' small concerns and the enormous thing happening around them. When it doesn't, it produces scenes where a campy assassin dispatches his attack dogs to chase a donkey while the Holy Family walks serenely in the background, and you have to wonder what decisions were made in that writers' room.

A Nativity Film That Actually Has a Plot

Bo lives in a mill, grinding grain in circles, dreaming of escape. He breaks out one night, injures himself, and is nursed back to health by Mary (Gina Rodriguez), a young woman from Nazareth who has just received some very unexpected news from an angel. Bo and his new best friend Dave the dove (Keegan-Michael Key, completely committed) attach themselves to Mary's household just as she and Joseph (Zachary Levi) begin their journey to Bethlehem for the census.

Meanwhile, King Herod's soldiers are pursuing the Holy Family with two attack dogs, Thaddeus and Rufus. Meanwhile, three camels (Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, and Tracy Morgan, forming possibly the most expensive camel trio in cinema history) are transporting the Magi across the desert. Everyone is converging on Bethlehem. The film knows where it's going, and so do you, and that dramatic irony is used well for at least two-thirds of the runtime.

What saves it from being a cynical product is that the filmmakers genuinely cared about the source material. Director Timothy Reckart and producer DeVon Franklin, who developed the project specifically as a faith-based animated film, treated the Nativity not as a backdrop for comedy but as the actual point. The animals are silly. The story behind them is not. That tonal balance is harder to maintain than it sounds, and The Star mostly pulls it off.

The Voice Cast: Stacked for a $20 Million Budget

The casting is extraordinary for a film of this scale. Steven Yeun brings genuine warmth and physical comedy instincts to Bo; you buy his yearning. Keegan-Michael Key does what Keegan-Michael Key does, which is elevate every scene through sheer energy. Gina Rodriguez's Mary is quietly the emotional center of the film, and she plays the role with more dignity than the script probably asked for.

The camels are a separate universe. Oprah Winfrey plays Deborah with the calm authority of someone who once told 300 audience members they were getting cars. Tyler Perry and Tracy Morgan round out the trio, mostly riffing off each other. Their subplot exists primarily so the film can cut away from the main action for comic relief, and it works about half the time.

Kelly Clarkson, Kristin Chenoweth, and Patricia Heaton fill out supporting roles. The celebrity count is so high that the movie sometimes feels like a charity telethon that got out of hand in the best possible way.

What the Animation Gets Right

The animation was produced by Cinesite Studios, not Sony's own animation division, and it shows some of the limitations of that arrangement. Character designs are expressive but not distinctive enough to feel like they belong to a fully realized world. The environments, particularly the night scenes approaching Bethlehem, have a genuine visual beauty that the daytime scenes lack.

Where the animation succeeds is in the animals themselves. Bo's donkey movement feels physically accurate in a way that Pixar's films established as the standard for animated animals, and the film meets that standard. Dave the dove flutters, perches, and panics with the specific anxiety of a small bird that knows exactly how fragile it is.

The Mariah Carey Factor

The film was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Original Song, for the title track performed by Mariah Carey. The song is exactly what you expect from Mariah Carey performing a Christmas-adjacent ballad. Whether that is a compliment depends on your relationship with Mariah Carey, who at this point is less a human being and more a natural phenomenon that occurs every November.

The soundtrack also features contributions from Fifth Harmony, Pentatonix, and Kirk Franklin, which gives the film the feeling of a very well-resourced Sunday school pageant. Again: whether that's a feature or a bug is entirely personal.

Is The Star Worth Watching?

This is a genuinely kind-hearted film that works better than its mixed critical reception suggested. The Rotten Tomatoes score landed around 42%, which is accurate in the sense that the film is flawed, but misleading in the sense that the flaws are mostly in the thriller subplot that exists to give the movie plot mechanics, not in the core story it's trying to tell.

For families with children who are too young for the darkness of most live-action Christmas films and who have some connection to the Christian tradition, The Star fills a genuinely underserved niche. It treats the Nativity story with respect while also understanding that a movie about animals at the first Christmas should probably be funny.

The final scene, where Bo stands in the stable and the full weight of where he's ended up registers on his face, is the best moment in the film. It earns it.