Perhaps the only way to turn Kahlil Gibran’s romantic, trippy and uplifting “The Prophet” into a movie is to animate it. The actress and producer Salma Hayek got that, and talked Roger Allers (“The Lion King”) into directing the film, actors like Liam Neeson and John Krasinski into providing the voices and acclaimed animators such as Tomm Moore and Nina Paley (“The Secret of Kells”) and Bill Plympton (“Guard Dog”) to visualize the abstract positivism of Gibran’s homey aphorisms, and composer Gabriel Yared to set some of the poetry to music.
They turn this “inspirational fiction” about how to the live the well-lived life, his musings on love, work, children, grief, joy and pleasure into colorful animated fantasias backing his words.
Liam Neeson has the title role, a famed poet named Mustafa living under house arrest on an island in the last days of the Ottoman Empire. Salma Hayek is Kamila, the widow who comes to clean his house and is inspired by him as she does. Quvenzhané Wallis of “Annie” voices Almitra, Salima’s rebellious, pilfering daughter, who refuses to speak.
Mustafa doesn’t have that problem. Even when he’s offered the chance to end his house arrest by sailing off into exile, he fills the locals’ eager ears with his warmth and wisdom.
“You can only be free… when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal…Rise above your cares and fears.”
“Your children are not your children,” but “sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.”
When The Prophet compares parents to bows and children to the arrows they send into the world, animation by Nina Paley shows that. Literally.
Yared (he did the score to “The English Patient”) turn poems about love into music videos.
At every step of his journey from house arrest to the docks, Mustafa teaches, blesses and challenges. To newlyweds — “Fill each other’s cup. But drink not from one cup…Give you hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.”
To working folk who worship his higher calling — artist, poet — “All work is noble…To be idle is to become a stranger to the seasons.”
Allers has nicely condensed the sentimental prose poems on each subject the Lebanese-American Gibran weighs in on, and Neeson’s soothing brogue makes a warm vehicle for poetry.
The animation varies from cut-out style shadow puppets to lush impressionism, expressionism and Plympton’s signature pencil drawings.
As with the book it is based on, “The Prophet” is only as deep as you make it. Animating it infantilizes the “teachings” and points to the clunky, Platonic dialogues style of the narrative.
But it’s a lovely work, imbued with all the sweetness a Who’s Who of great animators can give it and all the wisdom generation of college coeds have embraced, scribbling “How true” in the margins of their dog-eared copies of “The Prophet.”

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements including some violence and sensual images

Cast: The voices of Liam Neeson, Salma Hayek, John Krasinski, Alfred Molina
Credits: Directed by Roger Allers, script by Roger Allers, based on the Kahlil Gibran book. A GKids release.

Running time: 1:24