The Prince of Egypt sets out to make an animated epic out of the Book of Exodus, and it lands squarely in the middle of its own ambition. DreamWorks spent its first traditionally animated feature on a 99-minute musical drama with songs by Stephen Schwartz and a score by Hans Zimmer. The cast is a roll call of 1990s Hollywood: Val Kilmer as Moses, Ralph Fiennes as Rameses, Michelle Pfeiffer as Tzipporah, Sandra Bullock as Miriam, Jeff Goldblum as Aaron, Danny Glover as Jethro, Patrick Stewart as Seti, Helen Mirren as the Queen, plus Steve Martin and Martin Short as the priests Hotep and Huy.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
A Prince of Egypt and a Brother Named Rameses
The film follows Moses from an adopted prince of Egypt to the prophet who leads the Hebrews out. Seti, fearing the growing Hebrew population, orders the killing of newborn Hebrew boys. Moses’s mother Yocheved sets him on the Nile in a basket; Queen Tuya adopts him. Years later, Moses and Rameses wreck a temple, and Seti names Rameses prince regent.
The bond between the brothers is the film’s best idea. When Moses learns of the genocide and kills a slave driver, he flees into the desert despite Rameses’s pleas. That break — two men who love each other, split by what one of them is — is where the movie works.
‘Only Slaves’
the Hebrews were “only slaves”
Seti’s line is the hinge of the whole film. Moses disbelieves Miriam until she sings their mother’s lullaby, and he learns the truth of the genocide from a nightmare and then from Seti himself. The movie is honest that Moses’s awakening is slow, and that he is complicit before he is anything else.
350 Artists, 34 Countries
DreamWorks built the film with a crew of 350 people from 34 countries, many poached from Walt Disney Feature Animation and Amblimation. It was the studio’s first feature animated entirely in-house at its Glendale building, using software from Toon Boom Technologies and Silicon Graphics.
That history is visible. The blend of traditional animation and computer imagery gives the plagues and the parting of the sea a scale the studio’s later comedies never attempted. Jeffrey Katzenberg had pushed an animated Ten Commandments since his Disney years and put it into production after co-founding DreamWorks in 1994.
The Songs Are the Problem
For a movie sold on Schwartz’s songs, the music does not carry the weight the story needs. The film wants to be a musical and a serious drama, and the two halves pull against each other. The comedy of Hotep and Huy, voiced by Martin and Short, sits awkwardly beside the infanticide that opens the film.
A Premiere at Royce Hall
The Prince of Egypt premiered at Royce Hall in Los Angeles on December 16, 1998. It arrived as a statement of intent from a studio with no animation legacy of its own, and it carried that weight into every frame.
What the Score Actually Says
A Metacritic score of 64 out of 100 is fair. The Prince of Egypt is a genuine technical achievement and a serious swing, and it is not the classic its reputation sometimes claims.
What matters is the brother story. Moses and Rameses are the reason to watch, and the film knows it. Everything else — the songs, the star voices, the spectacle — is noise around that.
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