Rob Munday
If you’re making an animated short called Jesus 2, in which Christ returns to Earth for his second coming, there’s probably little point in approaching the material with too much reverence. Sincerity, in this case, would seem almost beside the point. Instead, writer/director Jesse Moynihan opts for the abstract, the surreal and the gloriously unhinged, cramming his eight-minute pilot with space pirates, magical rainbow goo and a resurrected Jesus who is not the saviour, but a “complete asshole.”
Originally conceived as a children’s show for Cartoon Network, the premise is very simple! In a future where death has been eradicated, Doc Green, president of the Zombie Nation, resurrects JC as a publicity stunt for the zombie population. Unfortunately, this particular Messiah proves less interested in salvation than in riding around on a black comet, coating planets and their inhabitants in his magical rainbow goo and, in the process, bestowing eternal life upon them. Attempting to put a stop to this “incredible jerk” are Sunday and Monday, a pair of space-pirate heroes who have been bestowed with special powers by angels. It’s a story as old as time!
The result is absolute chaos, mashing together religion, science-fiction and comedy. However, beneath the madness Jesus 2 reportedly emerged from a much more grounded and relatable place – the filmmaker’s struggles with panic attacks and his fear of death. In that context, you start to wonder whether this manic, scattergun approach is actually more of a comical attempt to grapple with an existential problem: if you find the prospect of death absolutely terrifying, perhaps the only reasonable response is to resurrect Jesus, put him on a space comet and cover the universe in rainbow goo?
With Jesus 2 now online, Moynihan is eager to discover whether ‘any of these ideas about death and our connection to the sublime and the grotesque would resonate with anyone else’. Judging by the hundreds of thousands of views the film has already accumulated across YouTube and Vimeo, the response appears promising. Whether this constitutes a genuine audience appetite for the further adventures of Sunday, Monday and JC2, we’ll have to wait and see. However, if the internet gets its way, this second coming may not be the last.