A co-production of Japanese animation studio Toei and Saudi Arabian media company Manga Productions, The Journey is a retelling of an event in Arabian history generally known as “The Year of the Elephant.” This appellation comes from the fact that an invading army, headed by a Christian Abyssinian king named Abraha, brought war elephants to the fight, something that was apparently so alarming and striking that it remained a central component of the tale as it passed through history. While the film, at ninety minutes long, is a relatively condensed version of the event, it's interesting for the way it blends religious elements shared by all of the Abrahamic faiths with the recounting of the story, and while some parts of the narrative do have that propaganda feel to them, at its heart the basic themes of the film are actually quite universal.

First and foremost, The Journey is an underdog story. The main protagonist of the piece is a young father named Aws, who as a boy was orphaned and kidnapped by a ruthless gang of criminals. Branded and forced to steal for them, Aws eventually escaped and made his way to Mecca, where a family he tried to rob took him in and raised him as their son. Now married with an infant, Aws has more than just his own survival riding on defeating Abraha – to him, defending his adoptive town means repaying the kindness that was shown to him, because he would have very likely died had he not been given the chance at a better life. At this point in history, Mecca is a fairly small settlement, which means that every able-bodied man is needed to fend off the invaders, making this also a story about a small army facing off (and defeating; it's history, so that's not a spoiler) a much larger, better-armed one. (While statements are made about “heathen desecrating a holy city” within the film, it's worth remembering that this is a line spoken throughout cultures and history.) As a parent, Aws is a bit older than many action anime protagonists, and that does ground him a bit more in terms of why he's so set on fighting. He's got not just parents in danger, but also a wife and baby.

The art and animation do a good job of showing us just how outnumbered the defenders of Mecca are. There's a fairly heavy reliance on bird's eye views of the field of battle, which not only gives us a clear sense of how much bigger and better trained Abraha's forces are, but also turns out to relate to actual birds who form part of the story towards the end of the film. As a movie about battle, there is a fair amount of blood on screen, but no actual gore – no dismemberment, exposed intestines, or anything like that. The worst we see is blood gushing from a wounded Elephant and a few implied deaths via stabbing, which isn't bad, all things considered, although it may be upsetting to younger viewers. The elephants look and move a bit awkwardly and all of Abraha's soldiers look very much the same (which cannot be said of Aws' companions), but this is in part made up for by the shift in art and animation style for the three embedded narratives that different characters recall at points during the film – the use of limited animation, nearly monochromatic tones, and an older manga art style is striking and at times quite beautiful.

Those embedded narratives are, it must be noted, religious in tone. Two of them are particularly interesting from a comparative religions point of view – the first is the story of Noah's Ark from the Islamic perspective and the second the story of the Exodus from Egypt, which some of you may know as the Passover story. From my knowledge of the stories as a Jewish woman, they're both recognizable and fascinatingly different, with Noah's Ark adding in characters I wasn't familiar with and the Exodus focusing on Rachael (Rahil) and bringing in Rebecca as well. In any event, the use of these stories, as well as a third about the fall of a wicked city where the wealthy freely abused the poor, are all used to compliment Aws' plotline, showing them as giving him and those waiting for him the strength to carry on against terrible odds and the faith to believe that victory is possible. Since there is a divine intervention element to the film's denouement that feels like it has links to the plagues of the Exodus story, this really does work quite well.

The metaphorical Elephant in the room is, of course, some viewers' potential discomfort with a film that could be viewed as propaganda based on the aim of Manga Productions and its parent company MiSK to "promote Saudi ideas and messages internationally." There is a propaganda feel to parts of the film and it does cover a piece of history that may be unfamiliar to people outside Saudi Arabia or Islam, but it's no more striking than any work of fiction that uses a religious or quasi-religious event as its base; certainly you'd see something similar in a faith-based novel. While most of the characters are male, there's nothing overtly anti-feminist about the story unless you balk at pieces with mostly male casts in general.

The Journey isn't the best anime movie to come out in recent years, but it's by no means a terrible one. While it can feel gratingly religious if that's not your thing, it does look good and the dub cast does a very nice job, even with lines that can at times come off as cheesy. If nothing else, it's an interesting piece of history, and a competently-told story.