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The Prince of Egypt poster

The Prince of Egypt

1998 · Simon Wells

For when you want to feel swept up by something grand — a family film with real gravity, equally right for a nostalgic rewatch or introducing kids to what animation can do at full scale. Comfort viewing with an epic's weight.

What it's about

Two brothers raised as princes of Egypt — one the heir, one adopted — are torn apart when Moses learns who he really is and what he's called to do. DreamWorks' telling of the Exodus story plays it as fraternal tragedy first and miracle second: the plagues, the burning bush, and the parting of the sea all land harder because the man on the other side of them is family.

The experience

Genuinely awe-inspiring — this is animation reaching for the epic register, and hitting it. It's sincere in a way big-studio animation rarely risks, emotionally heavy for a family film, with musical numbers that raise the hair on your arms.

Performances

The voice cast plays it straight as drama rather than cartoon — Ralph Fiennes gives Rameses a wounded pride that makes the brothers' rift genuinely tragic.

The craft

DreamWorks' first hand-drawn feature, with Gustave Doré engravings and David Lean's desert vistas as stated visual references — hand-drawn figures dwarfed by digitally assisted spectacle in the burning bush, the plagues, and the parting of the sea, which remain among the medium's great setpieces. Hans Zimmer's score and Stephen Schwartz's songs, including 'When You Believe,' demand good speakers.

Why it matters

Jeffrey Katzenberg's declaration that animation could be made for grown-ups, launched in direct challenge to his former studio — it proved a non-Disney house could produce a hand-drawn epic of this ambition, and its setpieces are still a benchmark.

Reception & legacy: how The Prince of Egypt was received, argued over, and remembered →

DreamWorks Animation's first hand-drawn feature was Jeffrey Katzenberg's declaration of war on his former studio: if Disney wouldn't make grown-up animation, he would — and he opened with Exodus. Co-directed by Brenda Chapman (soon to become the first woman to direct a major American animated feature outright, with Brave), Simon Wells, and Steve Hickner, it reframes scripture as a fraternal tragedy — two brothers raised as princes, pulled apart by identity and duty — and plays it with a sincerity mainstream animation rarely risks. The visual ambition was explicit: Gustave Doré's engravings and David Lean's desert vistas were the stated references, and sequences like the burning bush, the plagues, and the parting of the sea remain among the medium's great setpieces, hand-drawn figures dwarfed by digitally-assisted immensity. Hans Zimmer's score and Stephen Schwartz's songs — 'When You Believe' took the Oscar — carry a story consulted on by hundreds of theologians across three faiths. Val Kilmer voices Moses, and, in a quiet stroke of casting-as-theology, God as well: the divine voice a man might mistake for his own.

Lines of influence