Owlegories, a Gospel-Centered Animated Series for Kids [Review]

Owlegories is a new animated series from Thomas and Julie Boto, who created Owlegories “because we wanted a fun way to teach our kids about our great God and His amazing love for us.” It’s geared to ages 8 and under.

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The DVD, which is labeled “Volume 2,” features three 20-minute episodes—The Ant, The Fruit, and The Butterfly.

• The Ant is about working together and finding three ways followers of Christ should be like ants.
• The Fruit is about collecting fruit and learning about about the Fruit of the Spirit.
• The Butterfly is about discovering three ways a follower of Christ is like a caterpillar.

In each episode, the five owls—Joey, Nora, Violet, Gus and Twitch—are sent on an adventure by their Professor. When they accomplish their mission, they’ve learned that episode’s lesson.

In all three episodes, the owl heroes have their plans challenged by a hummingbird named Fink and a bumbling, conniving owl named Devilin.

The characters are self-aware, sometimes breaking the fourth wall and talking about the animators. The best thing about the series is the humor. It’s packed with it. There are plenty of re-watchable moments here, too. And with the top notch animation and overall presentation, there’s no reason this shouldn’t do well and start showing up on Saturday morning Christian television.

The episodes do borderline on being too preachy at times. The owls read a pledge every episode, quote scriptures and are straight-up given biblical lessons in their “Theowlogy Class.” The creators are so creative, I would have preferred if they’d creatively constructed the episodes to ramp up the humor even more since that’s their strength, and leave the plain spoken teaching for the animated recap and the nice vignettes by Christian leaders after each episode (Trillia Newbell, Angie Smith and Robert Morris). This short wrap-up is like a children’s church object lesson and is an addition parents will love. Though, in my real-life litmus test, my 7-year-old—who laughed out load with each episode, knew the character’s names by the end of episode two, and wanted to restart when they were over—lost interest every time the “real life person” started talking.

The DVD also includes an Extras section that has a slew of nine “Optical Owlusions,” which best as I can figure is the creator’s kids playing around with the video software. Kids and objects disappear and reappear on screen…and make you wonder why these appear on the DVD at all. Kids will likely enjoy checking them out once, but there’s certainly no replay value especially since this sort of thing is all over YouTube. A song video from the Ant episode, however, provides more promise and reminds you of a Veggietales silly song with Larry. Wish there had been more of these. Maybe they’ll make a future DVD/CD set full of them.

The creators also included a short presentation about why they made Owlegories.

Overall: Recommended.

Find out more about Owlegories at Owlegories.com where you can also download their app.

You can get the Owlegories Vol. 2 DVD at FishFlix for $9.99, and if you sign up for their email list, you can get $5 off that. (You can also get that savings by texting 5-GIFT to 44222.) Not bad! They have plenty of other Christian DVDs, too.

Disclosure: I received this Owlegories DVD free from the FishFlix review program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”