As we’ve often heard, some modern films may feel difficult to enjoy! Yet today we celebrate famed animated tales of yore, including the artists behind classic characters like Cogsworth, Iago, Pumbaa, Pocahontas, Mulan, and Kronk … and now, coming this fall, the greatest Hero of all. Famed animators and twin brothers Tony and Tom Bancroft bring their magic to our studio in advance of their next feature film in cinemas, the traditionally animated Light of the World.

Tony Bancroft is a 2D animator with a passion for animating, directing, storytelling, creating, and teaching the next generation.

With over 30 years in the animation industry, Tony Bancroft has been creatively involved in almost every position making an animated film, video, commercial, or short film. His animation and directing skills have been sharpened and honed while working at Walt Disney Feature Animation, Sony Pictures, his own animation company, Toonacious Family Entertainment, and currently, as an independent contractor working with Disney, Warner Brothers, and many more.

Tom Bancroft has over 30 years of experience in the animation industry, much of which was for Walt Disney Feature animation where he was an animator on 4 animated shorts and 8 feature films of which “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King,” “Aladdin”, “Pocahontas”, “Mulan”, and “Brother Bear” were part of the list. He has been nominated for Annie and Rueben division awards, spoken at the Kennedy Center and awarded an entry into the Chicago Children’s Film Festival.

Bancroft left Disney in 2000 to follow his heart and help Big Idea Productions, creators of the popular “VeggieTales” animated series, create their first feature film, “Jonah: A Veggietales Movie”.  While there he also Directed/ co-created the popular 2D animated video series “Larryboy Adventures”.

This month at the Realm Makers Expo, we met many skilled Christian creators who are making amazing stories in books, games, and the visual arts. Yet some people believe all this stuff is outdated and will be replaced by so-called “AI art.” Are they right? Will computer-generated fictional content outpace art made by humans? And is such a belief even biblically defensible?

Last week, Zackary Russell and E. Stephen Burnett celebrated the Realm Makers Expo![1. Photo by Felix Mooneeram on Unsplash.] That means this episode is another Stephen solo show. This one reveals a shocking truth: these days Stephen finds a lot more joy in books than he sees at the movie houses. Can fans, including Christians, help save the cinema from synthetic moralities, sloppy franchises, and scandalized/sillified superheroes?

The unfortunate impact is Rotten Tomatoes and other review aggregators regularly give major boosts to movies where reviewers generally lean in a more positive direction, but few people react negatively, by presenting them as having a higher score than movies that were genuinely reviewed better, yet elicited more negative responses.

At the end of the day, everyone has unique tastes, and that includes movie critics, so the notion of taking all those disparate opinions on a movie, distilling it down into a simple thumbs up/down, then aggregating that into an average approval rating and expecting it to be applicable to individual audience members seems very backward. As always, audiences are better off finding a particular reviewer or outlet they tend to agree with and trusting in their reviews, or even better, take a “risk” and go see a movie with an exciting premise, cool marketing, or an actor or director you like and form your own opinion.

I used to be a major proponent of wanting things “comics accurate,” but nowadays I prefer the phrase “comics consistent.” Not all “accurate to the comics” ideas are good, but if you take what consistently is good and works with the characters, you can’t go wrong. That said, all of these Batmen [Adam West, Christian Bale, and Ben Affleck] are great in their own way, and work in their own way for consistent reasons — but that doesn’t mean they all need to be the same.

As we’ve often heard, some movies feel difficult to enjoy! Yet today we want to celebrate animated films across the years, including the artists behind classic characters like Cogsworth, Iago, Pumbaa, Pocahontas, Mulan, and Kronk … and now, coming this fall, the greatest Hero of all. Famed animators and twin brothers Tony Bancroft and Tom Bancroft bring their magic to our studio in advance of their next feature film in cinemas, the traditionally animated Light of the World.

Christian missionaries have traveled oceans to strange new lands.[1. “Clayfire” game concept art is courtesy The Salvation Poem Project.] They’ve smuggled Bibles into hostile territory. Someday they will even journey to space settlements. But what about today’s virtual mission fields in digital spaces, like gaming platforms and communities? Developer Brock Henderson with Christian Game Developers, whose conference teams up this month with Realm Makers, joins us to explore Kingdom service in these open worlds.

Brock Henderson is an Iowa-based game developer, designer, and missionary. He believes that video games are the preeminent art form of this century, with an ever-growing influence on our culture. His current work focuses on creating games that move beyond entertainment and spark connections between people. In his 15 years in game development, he has had the privilege of working on everything from the silly to the serious, shipping over 25 titles on nine platforms with more than 3 million downloads. He is the head of game development for the Salvation Poem Project and the founder of PxlPug. He also serves as board president for the Christian Game Developers Community and blogs and podcasts at Faith Forms.

Zackary Russell and E. Stephen Burnett are heading for the Realm Makers Expo! That means next week’s episode may be delayed, or might release Tuesday. Either way, it’ll be another Stephen solo show. This one reveals a shocking truth: these days Stephen finds a lot more joy in books than he sees at the movie houses. Can the modern cinema be saved from synthetic moralities, sloppy franchises, and scandalized/sillified superheroes?

Today it appears cooler heads have cancelled the apocalypse.[1. Photo by Emanuel Kypreos on Unsplash.] But were we ever really in that level of danger? This sense of dread feels new. But as C. S. Lewis once wrote, we must practice timeless wisdom when we’re living in an atomic age: “If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts.” Here and elsewhere, how does Lewis encourage us in the art of living and learning in wartime?

To call [war] useless because it did not also cure slums and unemployment is like coming up to a man who has just succeeded in defending himself from a man-eating tiger and saying, “It’s no good, old chap. This hasn’t really cured your rheumatism!” On the test of fact, then, I find the Pacifist position weak. It seems to me that history is full of useful wars as well as of useless wars.

All Christians know that they must forgive their enemies. But “my enemy” primarily means the man whom I am really tempted to hate and traduce. If you listen to young Christian intellectuals talking, you will soon find out who their real enemy is. He seems to have two names—Colonel Blimp and “the business-man”. I suspect that the latter usually means the speaker’s father, but that is speculation. What is certain is that in asking such people to forgive the Germans and Russians and to open their eyes to the sins of England, you are asking them, not to mortify, but to indulge, their ruling passion. I do not mean that what you are asking them is not right and necessary in itself; we must forgive all our enemies or be damned. But it is emphatically not the exhortation which your audience needs. The communal sins which they should be told to repent are those of their own age and class—its contempt for the uneducated, its readiness to suspect evil, its self-righteous provocations of public obloquy, its breaches of the Fifth Commandment. Of these sins I have heard nothing among them. Till I do, I must think their candour towards the national enemy a rather inexpensive virtue. If a man cannot forgive the Colonel Blimp next door whom he has seen, how shall he forgive the Dictators whom he hath not seen?

Probably the scenes [your human patient] is now witnessing will not provide material for an intellectual attack on his faith—your previous failures have put that out of your power. But there is a sort of attack on the emotions which can still be tried. It turns on making him feel, when first he sees human remains plastered on a wall, that this is “what the world is really like” and that all his religion has been a fantasy.

You will notice that we have got them completely fogged about the meaning of the word “real.” They tell each other, of some great spiritual experience, “All that really happened was that you heard some music in a lighted building”; here “Real” means the bare physical facts, separated from the other elements in the experience they actually had. . . .

The general rule which we have now pretty well established among them is that in all experiences which can make them happier or better only the physical facts are “Real” while the spiritual elements are “subjective”; in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them the spiritual elements are the main reality and to ignore them is to be an escapist.

Thus in birth the blood and pain are “real”, the rejoicing a mere subjective point of view; in death, the terror and ugliness reveal what death “really means”. The hatefulness of a hated person is “real” — in hatred you see men as they are, you are disillusioned; but the loveliness of a loved person is merely a subjective haze concealing a “real” core of sexual appetite or economic association. Wars and poverty are “really” horrible; peace and plenty are mere physical facts about which men happen to have certain sentiments. The creatures are always accusing one another of wanting “to eat the cake and have it”; but thanks to our labours they are more often in the predicament of paying for the cake and not eating it.

Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment.

War makes death real to us: and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right. All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that are centred in this world, were always doomed to final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows.

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

What the atomic bomb has really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities.

Christian missionaries have traveled oceans to strange new lands. They’ve smuggled Bibles into hostile territory. Someday they will even journey to space settlements. But what about today’s virtual mission fields in digital spaces, like gaming platforms and communities? Developer Brock Henderson with Christian Game Developers, whose conference teams up this month with Realm Makers, joins us to explore Kingdom service in these open worlds.

Magic. The very word feels like a curse to many good Christians. Add other terms like witch or wizard and you’ll get an even more heated cauldron of controversy. We’re no strangers to that at Lorehaven. Now our longtime friend Marian A. Jacobs has created the definitive book treatment of this topic. This week, On Magic and Miracles is cast into the world, and Marian herself Apparates into our studio to compare fictional magic with occult dangers.

Marian A. Jacobs is passionate about writing fantasy, science fiction, and Christian story ethics for the edification of the Church and the glory of God. She and her husband have three children. When not writing, Marian spends time serving on her church’s worship team, watching movies, listening to audiobooks, and working on her seminary degree.

Today it appears cooler heads have cancelled the apocalypse. But were we ever really in that level of danger? This sense of dread feels new. But as C. S. Lewis once wrote, we must practice timeless wisdom when we’re living in an atomic age: “If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts.” Here and elsewhere, how does Lewis encourage us in the art of living and learning in wartime?

Jesus told many parables, some even fantastical. Yet some Christians presume these parables are simple allegories. Is this really the point of parables? Or do they reflect biblical truths in more meaningful ways? We’re inviting Cru ministry creatives who’ve made a new audio drama, inspired by the parable of the prodigal son, called The Road to Kaeluma. We’ll explore questions like: What are fantastical parables? And how do they prepare us for conversations about family relationships, the gospel, and the love of our heavenly Father?

Along with producing and co-writing The Road to Kaeluma, Perry voices Master Armstrong and Old Man Herman! In his role at Jesus Film Project®, he creates content for podcasts, short films, YouTube and other media platforms that can be heard and viewed globally. He feels called to innovate and create new avenues to reach the world digitally with the gospel.

“Having been transformed in college by Christ, through Cru® (the parent ministry of Jesus Film Project), I feel the immense gift of giving that opportunity to others through the ministry of digital media.”

Perry and his wife Brooke live with their dog Willow in Greenville, South Carolina. Brooke also works at Cru, serving as a writer and editor for FamilyLife.

Landon Hawley co-wrote and directed The Road to Kaeluma and voiced the characters of Jehu and Elrin, alongside a talented cast and crew. At Jesus Film Project, Landon crafts scripts for short films, mini-series and other types of media that can be used as ministry tools around the world.

“Creative writing has been a hobby of mine for years,” Landon says. “I love a good story, but I am captivated by stories like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe––stories that communicate truths about Christ and the gospel. That’s why I knew I wanted to team up with Perry to make The Road to Kaeluma, to tell a fantastical story rich with biblical truth that parents and kids can talk about together.”

Landon hails from Everett, Washington, but currently calls Orlando, Florida home.

Magic. The very word feels like a curse to many good Christians. Add other terms like witch or wizard and you’ll get an even more heated cauldron of controversy. We’re no strangers to that at Lorehaven. Now our longtime friend Marian A. Jacobs has created the definitive book treatment of this topic. Next week, On Magic and Miracles is cast into the world, and Marian herself Apparates into our studio to compare fictional magic with occult dangers.

Aircraft pilots see a lot of amazing sights, above the Earth in planes and even spaceships. But men who do this challenging work often confront the nastier sides of these hard jobs, struggling to stay good in a gritty world. For pilot and new sci-fi novelist Dan Daetz, these realities rocket into a cosmic setting when one man, with the ugliest job in the universe, must break free from his past. This week: what if a bad father, with a worse job, fought to become a hero?

Dan Daetz is a former combat fighter pilot and test pilot. He’s pulled over nine Gs, flown faster than Mach 2, and eaten dozens of gummi bears in a single sitting. When he’s not writing, Dan coaches leaders, enjoys the outdoors, and spoils his Australian Shepherds. He and his family live in Colorado, where they’ve stored enough junk food to outlast the zombie apocalypse.

Jesus told many parables, some even fantastical. Yet some Christians presume these parables are simple allegories. Is this really the point of parables? Or do they reflect biblical truths in more meaningful ways? We’re inviting Cru ministry creatives who’ve made a new audio drama, inspired by the parable of the prodigal son, called The Road to Kaeluma. We’ll explore questions like: What are fantastical parables? And how do they prepare us for conversations about family relationships, the gospel, and the love of our heavenly Father?

Realm Makers started in 2013 with a Christian-led speculative fiction writers’ conference. Now it’s a 24/7 organization to train aspiring authors, a traveling bookstore, and cousin to a stationary bookstore. This summer the conference levels up with the Realm Makers Expo, a crossover fan-centered event with many other Christian groups and fantastical creators. Join us for this inside look into the past, present and future of the Realm, featuring Scott Minor.

Scott Minor is the CEO of Realm Makers, a premier conference and community dedicated to supporting authors of faith who write fantasy and science fiction. With a passion for fostering creativity, he and his wife Becky work together to grow Realm Makers into a vital resource for Christian speculative fiction writers. Scott oversees operations, event planning, and the Realm Makers Bookstore, which promotes faith-based fantastical novels. A dynamic leader with a background in operations, project management, and acting, Scott also directs youth theater and has a deep love for the performing arts. Residing near Philadelphia, Penn., he continues to inspire and equip authors to share stories that explore truth and sacrifice.

On August 2-3, 2013, a core group of self-professed nerds are going to try something a just a little bit terrifying — we’re going to hold a conference just for people of faith who love science-fiction, fantasy, and all their odd offshoots.

The event is called Realm Makers, and it will take place on the campus of The University of Missouri, St. Louis, in their JC Penney conference center. …

A little over a year ago, a group of speculative fiction enthusiasts were talking online about science fiction and fantasy conventions, and how many of us would like to attend one, but how the pervasive presence of scantily-clad “booth girls,” the glorification of dark and evil ideals, and the sometimes-antagonistic tone toward Christianity made an otherwise awesome environment too uncomfortable for some fans. Half-jokingly, I suggested we needed a “con” of our own. One where we could talk about the stories we love, but conduct the discussion through the filter of our worldview. One where there might not be so many chain mail bikinis. Though I expected people to laugh, they didn’t. They agreed with me. The enthusiasm and excitement about the idea began to boil.

In order to keep the first attempt at Realm Makers manageable, we pared the idea of a full-blown convention down to a writers conference, since my main area of contact is with the fiction community.

Rebecca P. Minor, “Realm Makers 2013: An Expanding Vision,” Speculative Faith archive, March 22, 2013

Top question for listeners

Aircraft pilots see a lot of amazing sights, above the Earth in planes and even spaceships. But men who do this challenging work often confront the nastier sides of these hard jobs, struggling to stay good in a gritty world. For pilot and new sci-fi novelist Dan Daetz, these realities rocket into a cosmic setting when one man, with the ugliest job in the universe, must break free from his past. Next week: what if a bad father, with a worse job, fought to become a hero?

In just 1.5 months, the inaugural Realm Makers Expo will arrive in Grand Rapids. Like the continuing Realm Makers writers conference, this event marks a fantastic chance for Christian fans and creatives to meet with like-minded believers in Jesus. But any big Christian-led conference also attracts people who like biblical virtues and ideas as well as Christians ourselves, yet are not truly believers. How then can we best shine the gospel at Realm Makers?

Click here to register for the annual Realm Makers writers’ conference and/or the inaugural Expo!

Realm Makers started in 2013 with a Christian-led speculative fiction writers’ conference. Now it’s a 24/7 organization to train aspiring authors, a traveling bookstore, and cousin to a stationary bookstore. This summer the conference levels up with the Realm Makers Expo, a crossover fan-centered event with many other Christian groups and fantastical creators. Join us for this inside look into the past, present and future of the Realm, featuring Scott Minor.

Books will last after Jesus’s return. That’s clear from Revelation 20:12, which refers to human life record books used for judging the dead. What then about other kinds of books, especially fantastical novels? Will amazing stories made by Christians, including those we explore at Lorehaven, last forever? Can we enjoy new stories? And what about great stories created by nonbelievers?

Listen to our whole Epic Resurrection series.

Books are part of culture. I expect many new books, great books, will be written on the New Earth. But I also believe that some books will endure from the old Earth. Any book that contains falsehood and dishonors God will have no place in Heaven.[1. “Will There Be Books and Reading on the New Earth?”, Randy Alcorn, Aug. 24, 20212 (excerpted from Heaven).]

In just 1.5 months, the inaugural Realm Makers Expo will arrive in Grand Rapids. Like the continuing Realm Makers writers conference, this event marks a fantastic chance for Christian fans and creatives to meet with likeminded believers in Jesus. But any big Christian-led conference also attracts people who like biblical virtues and ideas as well as Christians ourselves, yet are not truly believers. How then can we best shine the gospel at Realm Makers?