'The Chosen Adventures' Animated Series to Reach a New Generation with the Gospel

The Chosen Adventures. Photo courtesy Pixabay
With nearly 800 million episodes streamed, how ca'n The Chosen streaming video series possibly climb to new heights? After all, the program was recently honored by the Guinness Book of World Records for being the most translated show in history.

Well, as the much-heralded show directed by Dallas Jenkins makes its way toward its triumphant conclusion in the forthcoming final seasons, The Chosen will augment its universe by adding an animated children’s programming called The Chosen Adventures.

Set to premiere this weekend on Prime Video, this 14-episode series follows nine-year old Abby and her best friend Joshua, as they experience life in the ancient city of Capernaum. When the precocious and perceptive pair encounter a wise teacher named Jesus, He changes their entire outlook on the world.

Starring Paul Walter Hauser (Richard Jewell) as a sheep, Yvonne Orji (Insecure) as a pigeon, and Romy Fay (The Wingfeather Saga) as Abby, The Chosen Adventures seeks to dispense the timeless truths of Christ as seen through vivid animated imagery. In addition, familiar cast members from the current series will appear on the new program including Paras Patel (Matthew), Elizabeth Tabish (Mary Magdalene), Noah James (Andrew), and Jonathan Roumie (Jesus).

I recently sat down with the show’s executive producer, Ryan Swanson, to discuss what sets this program apart from the original series, how The Chosen Adventures can reach a whole new generation with the Gospel, and outlines some of the greatest challenges of adapting the greatest story ever told for pint-sized audiences.

We have seen many kids animated series depicting the life of Jesus over the years, some good and others not so good. What sets this program apart from all the others and makes it dare I say “better”?

It's a good question. We start out with a pretty simple premise, which in this case was what was the show we wished we had had as kids? We sort of tracked it back to a few shows that stood out. Things like Veggie Tales, Adventure Time, and The Lego Movie. We looked at how those things worked. How do they bring a whole family around the couch or at a movie theater, where everybody's having their own experience, but a great time together? So, what I would say is that this show features Emmy Award winners who were drawn initially to The Chosen and were interested in what we were doing.

So, we had inroads with Yvonne Orji as far back as Season 1. She visited us early on. Paul Walter Hauser reached out to Dallas (Jenkins) at some point during Season 4 and said, ‘Hey man, look, I'm doing a bunch of stuff right now, but I would drop everything to come be on the show. My agents don't know your casting director but I want to make it work.’ So, there’s a lot of personal relationships, but what they bring to the show is a bonafide appeal of a Hollywood show. We've got real stars in this show that join our already proven Chosen stars.

It was really exciting for me to take our Chosen cast and get to show new angles of their characters. We play everything heightened by about 20%. Andrew (Noah James) is dealing with a child. He is not dealing with a neighbor kid. He's not dealing with the fate of the world. Abby (Romy Fay) gets into very universal kid-like adventures. A family in another part of the world or here in the U.S., that didn't come to the show to find themselves steeped in Christian values, they're going to find themselves rooting for a kid who lives a God-centered life. And once you start rooting, once you start relating, you are in that story and open to things that maybe you would've closed the door to otherwise. So, it starts out with a very universal story. It's not unlike our approach with The Chosen where we wanted to engage our audience emotionally in the journeys of our characters. We want to do that here, but from knee height, and we want to make it even more accessible by having a little girl going through little girl stuff with her BFF (best friend forever) and navigating a world that was just as confusing then as it is today.

What have been some of your greatest challenges in adapting the “Greatest Story Ever Told” to this type of audience?

Some of the challenges have been to bring the DNA of The Chosen live action show into a completely different medium. It is television, but it's a different age demographic that we're targeting. It's a different tone that we're trying to set. It's the same world, and we want to bring with us the DNA that's helped The Chosen land with an audience, but to tell it at a different speed, a different pace, with different characters, and with a slightly different angle on our world. That transition was challenging, and at various times, we were faced with looking for comparisons out in the marketplace. And a lot of the comps out there are really rapid fire, one-line zingers, or three jokes a minute type of pacing.

Our show hasn't ever been that. It's about engaging the heart, it's been from the heart, and to do that in this new medium was probably our most difficult challenge.

You have spent many years as part of the writing team for The Chosen, as well as other television and film projects too. Is this your first foray into children's animation fare?

It is but actually going way back to when I was 29 years old, the first script that I ever sold was a Goonies type adventure. So, it feels like a kind of return to written material that I wished I could go buy a ticket to. As I got older and started to find my footing with the folks I was working with at Warner Brothers, I saw not only a need in the marketplace, but also as a movie goer (for this type of programming). These were the films that I wanted to see. I wanted to kind of relive that stuff a lot. Some of my heroes remade what they wanted to see. Steven Spielberg always wanted to feel like a 15-year-old. And I could really identify with this.

This is a return in some ways. I haven't done that for a long time. And so to return there, I needed to find collaborators who knew how to speak that language and who were proficient in animation. It was a steep learning curve from the start, and it went all the way to the end of the season. And now, even in marketing, I'm learning things every day because I've tried to surround myself with people who do their jobs better than I can.

As we all know, The Chosen has an enormous fan base. Does this series have the ability to reach beyond the Christian audience to serve a wider group of people?

That's always the question. When we started The Chosen, Dallas (Jenkins), Tyler (Thompson) and I, along with Derral (Eves), we had a really simple mandate, which was, let's bring the story of the Bible to life in a way that conveys some of the impact it has had on us. Let's tell the story from the surrogate lens of the people in the perimeter. We can focus on that Jesus story. We don't have to change one line of what's in there about what Jesus is doing. We'll dramatize the people who we knew were there. We knew who must have been impacted by this. And The Chosen does a certain thing for an audience who got on board with that approach.

The Chosen Adventures will not hit for all of the Chosen audience. It just won't. There's people out there who are not interested in cartoons, they're not interested in a kid's story. They're not interested in the overly humorous parts of Jesus' ministry. But what I do think that this can do on its best day, this could be awesome. So let's just go for it. We took that same approach here as we did with The Chosen, but now looking at it in totality, I realize it could reach an audience that doesn't connect with the original show. The Chosen is very intentional about Jesus Christ. It is Jesus' ministry and life seen through the eyes of those He spent his time with. The Chosen Adventures is one step removed from that.

WATCH A TRAILER FOR THE CHOSEN ADVENTURES: