Tezuka made this for the Vatican, which means every frame carries weight, he's not retelling stories, he's translating faith into animation with the same precision he brought to everything else. The scriptural accuracy runs so deep that Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant advisors signed off on it, but it never feels like doctrine; it feels like watching someone discover why these stories mattered in the first place. A kid walks away understanding Noah, Moses, and David not as names in a book, but as people who had to choose something harder than survival.

Osamu Tezuka takes on the Old Testament in this animated retelling of biblical stories. Through the Italian national broadcaster, the Vatican asked the non-Christian Tezuka to bring the Bible to animation. He spent two years on a pilot about Noah's ark, writing the scenario and drawing pictures himself, but he died during production and Director Dezaki took over to finish the work. The result is a 26-episode TV series with action and drama. It aired in Japan in 1997 on the satellite channel WOWOW, after years of production in the late 1980s and early 1990s.