The following is excerpted from an online article posted by Relevant
Two hundred people volunteered their nights, weekends, lunch breaks and holidays to make a 12-minute animated film. Nobody got paid. It took six years. And last month, the Academy nominated it for Best Animated Short Film.
No dialogue. No narration. Twelve and a half minutes of animation and score, telling what Engelhardt describes as a version of the prodigal son parable — the one where the point isn’t the wandering, it’s the welcome home.
“This story really is about our faith journey and how we are that bear who ran away and was later saved,” he said.
That’s the quiet audacity of Forevergreen: it’s unapologetically Christian, but it isn’t pitching to the already-convinced. It doesn’t require a viewer to recognize the parable or know the vocabulary. It’s a story structured so that the scandal of grace hits emotionally before anyone’s had a chance to argue with it intellectually.
Source: Relevant
https://relevantmagazine.com/culture/movies/forevergreen-was-made-as-a-faith-fueled-passion-project-now-its-oscar-nominated/