Is America ready for Bible stories told by clean-cut tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, and asparagus?

VeggieTales characters such as Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber already are well-established stars in the church world, having sold more than 25 million videos since 1993.

But the talking, singing, pop-eyed vegetables will be making a huge jump to the silver screen Friday when Jonah - A VeggieTales Movie opens in more than 1,000 movie theaters including Showcase Cinemas Maumee.

“It will be interesting to see what Americans think of VeggieTales,” Phil Vischer, the cartoon's creator, said in an interview this week.

Mr. Vischer, who started making computer-generated cartoon videos in a spare bedroom in his suburban Chicago home in 1991, said that although he doesn't have exact figures, Jonah cost slightly less than $20 million to produce.

He and his longtime collaborator Mike Nawrocki have created 15 half-hour videos over the last nine years, but did not quite know what they were getting into with a full-length Hollywood feature.

“It's basically 21/2 times longer than a video so we thought, ‘That's OK, we've made more than 21/2 hours' worth of videos,'” said Mr. Vischer, a 36-year-old father of three. “But this is movie resolution, not TV resolution. Every frame is bigger and has about 10 times as much information in it.”

With real-life movies, he said, the backdrops are provided naturally - just point the camera and voila. With computer-generated cartoons, however, every tidbit of visual information must be created from scratch.

“You have to create every element of every item on the screen and then paint them with texture - dirt marks, water stains,” Mr. Vischer said. “‘Make it dirty' is the most expensive thing you can say in cgi.”

For example, he said, his company, Big Idea Productions, Inc., boosted the number of computers in its “render farm” - where the cartoon graphics are created - from about 40 to more than 500.

“Our half-hour videos used to take months to produce. Now we can render them in, oh, about a weekend,” Mr. Vischer said with a laugh.

The company's first video, released in 1993, was titled Where's God When I'm S-Scared? The video, which sold about 500 copies, told the biblical story of Daniel in the Lion's Den, starring Larry the Cucumber.

Some people immediately criticized him for portraying a Bible hero as a vegetable.

“My thought on that is it's very easy not to buy something,” Mr. Vischer said. “In general, people know we take our stories very seriously and we consider the themes of these stories to be sacred.”

But one of the reasons VeggieTales appeals so much to kids and adults alike is the way the writers, who cite Monty Python as an inspiration, take creative liberties with some of the incidental details.

“We do things like, when Daniel is in the lion's den, he has pizza with the lions,” Mr. Vischer said. “It's so ridiculous that the kids know right away that we made that part up.”

Jonah, which took 21/2 years to produce, follows the Bible story faithfully but, like Daniel's pizza order, there are some imaginative and humorous additions. While the Bible says that Jonah avoided the city of Ninevah, the VeggieTales version of Jonah (played by Archibald the Asparagus), contends that he disliked the city because its residents went around slapping people with fish.

One of the new characters introduced in the Jonah movie is not a vegetable, but a cheerful Arabic worm called Khalil.

“Someone asked me if Khalil is a Muslim character,” Mr. Vischer said. “Considering that the story of Jonah took place about 500 years before the birth of Christ and more than a thousand years before the birth of Muhammad, I'd say Khalil is probably Jewish.”

The movie does not overtly preach Christianity, but rather teaches the biblical principles of compassion and mercy, which are relevant to people of all faiths.

Mr. Vischer said there are two main reasons why his VeggieTales stories are almost always taken from the Old Testament, before Jesus was born.

For one, he said, “the New Testament has few chase scenes. It's a letter. The Old Testament stories teach biblical principles in action.”

But there is an even more compelling reason, he said.

“From Day One, when we first started, we said that we would never, ever portray Jesus as a vegetable,” Mr. Vischer said.

First Published September 28, 2002, 12:07 p.m.