Join Larry for a Ride on the What-If Express in It's a Meaningful Life

VeggieTales is a Christian video series that has been entertaining and enriching me for the past 15 years, and when I saw that their latest DVD had a tie-in with Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, one of my favorite movies to watch this time of year, I was doubly interested. It’s a Meaningful Life is a 45-minute-long video containing one long story, which has been the norm for VeggieTales Christmas videos. The basic story is basically a mix of Wonderful Life, The Family Man and The Polar Express, with plenty of fun Veggie twists tossed in.

Larry the Cucumber plays the role of Stewart, the main character who is named for Jimmy Stewart and is married to Donna (Petunia), who is named after Donna Reed. Though VeggieTales has been pairing these two up ever since Duke and the Great Pie War several years ago, it was still a little weird for me to see Larry playing the part of a man who is married with kids, since he usually comes across as such a big kid himself. But his scenes with both Petunia and his children, especially little Emma, are very sweet.

Although Stewart has a good life as the owner of the toy train factory handed down to him by his father and a volunteer peewee football coach, he can’t stop thinking about that fateful day years ago when he almost won the team’s big game. Instead, his buddy Morty (Mr. Lunt) made the winning play and went on to superstardom. When Morty comes back for a visit, all those old feelings of bitterness threaten to overwhelm him. Who could blame him for feeling a little sorry for himself when his own son can’t stop going on about how great Morty is?

In the early days, VeggieTales videos tended to have fairly simple props and backdrops. One of the main reasons the characters were vegetables was because they were pretty easy to animate. But there have been major advances since then, and the setting for It’s a Meaningful Life is rich and complex, particularly the scenes that show us Stewart’s tiny town. The action shots of the What-If Express rambling through the countryside as the Northern Lights appear in the night sky are also pretty impressive.

With only 45 minutes, plus time taken out for framing scenes on the countertop and a silly song, this is a story that cuts right to the chase. Everything happens very quickly. We get Stewart’s youth, then we see him as a dad in the autumn, and then in the winter. After he gets on the train, which is a combination of the Polar Express and the mysterious journey that Clarence takes George on in Wonderful Life, with a dash of A Christmas Carol thrown in, he makes only two stops to see the “hypothetical” stemming from his “regrettable”. First, he sees what his own life would be like if he’d been the big football hero instead of Morty. Then he sees what things would be like for everyone else in his town. Unlike George, Stewart is merely an observer, and he is unable to interact with any of these figures, but seeing his hollow life as a cranky, self-absorbed celebrity and the ruin that has befallen his town and loved ones, he reconsiders his own lot In life.

My favorite element of the main story is probably Stewart’s relationship with his adorable young adopted daughter, which is very reminiscent of George’s relationship with Zuzu. The lullaby he sings for her is very tender, and it sets us up for the considerably less sedate Silly Song, which has Junior Asparagus extending his awake time for as long as possible by requesting that his increasingly exasperated mother bring him every stuffed animal he can think of. Some of the animals in his collection are funny in and of themselves, and Junior’s hyper antics are hilarious and will probably resonate with anyone who has ever attempted to get a young child to go to sleep. Stewart’s peppy song about giving 110 percent is pretty catchy too and reminds me of something that Fred MacMurray might have sung in The Happiest Millionaire or any number of old Disney movies in which he played an enthusiastic dad. Probably the song most firmly stuck in my head, though, despite barely understanding a word of the lyrics, is the trippy commercial that first Morty and then Alternate Stewart records. It’s sung incredibly quickly, with a comparable barrage of goofy 2-D images, and the point is to show us how these characters have sold out by recording these obnoxious ads for products they don’t believe in.

Of VeggieTales’ four Christmas releases, this is the one that feels the least Christmassy, as quite a bit of it doesn’t take place at Christmas. There’s nothing on the countertop or in the Silly Song indicative of Christmas either. With so much of it involving football, it might feel just as seasonal in September. I suppose that the climax didn’t actually need to take place at Christmas, but it allows for more fun parallels with the above-mentioned movies. This video will probably entertain you most if you’ve seen any or all of those, but It’s a Meaningful Life is meaningful even if you don’t get all the little references to Christmastime classics, and I can’t wait to see what VeggieTales will come up with next.