Produced in Cape Town, the joyful animated musical David has been released in 44 international markets after passing seven million YouTube views for its trailers, and was called “the best animated film of 2025” in five-star reviews. The film’s creator, director and executive producer Phil Cunningham was born in Zimbabwe and is now based in Cape Town, South Africa
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When did you first have the idea for a movie about David?
For me, the story started 30 years ago, canoeing down the Zambezi River. You could canoe for four days, five nights. You wouldn’t see a human being. While I was out there, I just fell in love with adventure, with expansiveness. It was incredible, just looking up at the galaxies, the thunderstorms, the elephants, the buffalo, a charging lion. At the same time, I was reading about David, whose life is packed with adventure, music and fun. I found it so inspiring, the way he lived, taking on a giant, and lions and bears. At that stage, we weren’t even in the film business, but that’s where the vision for David was birthed.
You then founded Sunrise, made Africa’s first animated feature film, and built a YouTube channel that has had over seven billion views. When did you decide you were ready to finally tell David’s story?
A few years ago, my wife Jacqui and myself were walking through Paris, and we walked underneath the Arc de Triomphe. As a filmmaker and a creator, it was a moment of inspiration. As we looked up at the scale and attention to detail, I was like, ‘Wow, this is phenomenal.’ If you look all around Paris, you’ve got all these other buildings, like office blocks and factories. And as a filmmaker, we could just push out movies. But in Paris, at that moment, the penny dropped. We wanted to make David our Arc de Triomphe: a movie that will stand the test of time.
Adaptations are always controversial, because movies are different to books, so require changes, which fans don’t always appreciate. Was this one especially difficult?
Yes, making a movie like David is an incredible privilege and an incredible challenge, because your source material is the Bible. If you take comic book fans, they love their heroes and their worlds, so you can’t take Superman’s cape and put it on Spider Man, or you’re really going to upset the comic book fans. It’s the same in the faith community – at an even greater level. So as we made this movie, we made every effort to make sure we built it off a well-researched base. Of course, we wanted it to be fun, entertaining and full of adventure, but not at the expense of authenticity. As an example, we did multiple trips to Israel. There’s this beautiful principle at Disney: ‘People won’t always see the detail, but they’ll feel the detail.’ And so every frame of this movie is packed with detail, with Easter eggs, and we hope, as people watch this, they’ll feel that.
Why animation?
Animation’s got this incredible power to cross race, cultural, age and gender barriers – better than any other medium. Whether you’re four years old or 94, you can love an animation.
And why a musical?
I was saying to our team: if they could make a musical out of PT Barnum’s life, The Greatest Showman, shame on us, in a way, if we can’t make an amazing musical out of David, because he was authentically one of the world’s greatest songwriters and musicians, who’s credited with nearly half the Psalms.
One of the most moving parts of the film is David’s relationship with his mother, Nitzevet.
Yes, David is a movie that champions mothers. It was inspired by my own mother. She was the most incredible human being. When we were 14 years old, she was like, ‘Phil, by your age, David was fighting Goliath and Daniel was in the lion’s den. What are you doing with your life? Get out there. Step out. Take a risk. Have an adventure.’ I remember that so clearly. In the Psalms, David says to God, ‘I serve you as my mother did.’ And I love that, because that’s a clear indication that his mother had a massive impact on his life. And we know that his great-grandmother was Ruth, so the women in his life had a huge part to play in who he became and the kind of leader he was. So often in movies, mothers are stereotyped into a protective corner. And of course, that’s an element of being a mother, but mothers do so much more than that. They inspire their generations. So we wanted this movie to speak to that.
Many of us are out of the habit of going to the cinema. Why should people watchDavid in cinemas, rather than just wait for it to come to streaming?
In the spirit of building an Arc de Triomphe kind of film, we designed David for cinema. The way it’s framed, the sound design, the music – everything was engineered for the big screen. So you’ll get the most beautiful experience if you can get to a cinema.
What do you hope audiences will take away from the film?
At Sunrise, as a studio, our whole mission is to inspire through story. So that’s our passion behind David: that people would walk out, no matter where they come from, inspired to take on the giants in their life.
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