Featuring the voices of Liam Neeson and Salma Hayek. Rated G.

A long-gestating labour of love for part-Lebanese producer Salma Hayek, this opulently visual tribute to the Lebanese-born, Catholic-raised Kahlil Gibran strings together some of the poet’s best-known musings on life, love, death, work, and art, with each chapter given to a different animator, most working in radically contrasting media.

For commercial purposes, one supposes, it was deemed necessary to connect those sections with narrative tissue. And under the guidance of The Lion King director Roger Allers, The Prophet gets a Disney makeover that’s ultimately even more disturbing than it is cloying.

Scripted by Allers (who also worked on Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast) and two others, this concept features Hayek as Kamila, an Esmeralda-like widow stuck in a Mediterranean port town with a rebellious Disney princess, er, mute daughter (eventually voiced by Quvenzhané Wallis). The kid’s marketplace perambulations are the cause of much slapstick hilarity—hey, those fruit vendors are just asking for it, right?—leading young viewers far astray from the poetry and much heavier plot turns to come.

Kamila’s cleaning job takes her to the hilltop cabin of Mustafa, an artist and author with an impossibly mellifluous voice and gentle disposition. He’s imprisoned there by the local military, who obviously confused this Liam Neeson with the hard-core dude from the Taken movies. Mustafa is guarded by a young fellow (John Krasinski) in love with Kamila and bossed about by a fat, fascistic sergeant (Alfred Molina), who ostensibly arrives to free the poet but appears to have darker designs for him.

Why? It’s hard to say, but totalitarians are often threatened by beauty, and that’s what they (or we) get in segments that vary from Bill Plympton’s coloured-pencil pastoral to Joan Gratz’s stop-motion clay painting and the flat shadow puppets of Nina Paley, who also made Sita Sings the Blues.

Although developments in the story relate tangentially to the author’s writings and life (Gibran drank himself to death, in the U.S., at age 48), the connecting segments look cheap by comparison with the gorgeous near abstraction of the rest, and the ending is surprisingly brutal.

More than anything else, Mustafa’s ceaseless flow of charming bromides (“Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing”) could prove as irritating to children as it does to touchy authorities.