The Prince of Egypt · reception & legacy

1998 · Simon Wells

How The Prince of Egypt has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A hit in 1998 that still felt like an underdog next to Disney — but it's since been fully canonised, routinely topping 'best non-Disney animation' lists and fuelling the eternal 'DreamWorks peaked here' take.

What's debated

The perennial fight it starts: is this the best animated musical ever made — better than anything from the Disney Renaissance it was built to rival?

Its footprint

'When You Believe' — the Whitney Houston/Mariah Carey duet — won the Oscar for Best Original Song, and 'The Plagues' and 'Deliver Us' live forever as the internet's go-to proof that animated musicals can go HARD; the Red Sea parting is one of the most-shared frames in animation.

Where it stands

A Letterboxd sacred cow — the 'animation is cinema' exhibit A that people rewatch every Passover/Easter and rate five stars without apology.

★ Did you know? Val Kilmer voiced both Moses AND the voice of God — and the production consulted hundreds of biblical scholars and religious leaders (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim) to get the story right.

Named by the director

Influences Simon Wells has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

The Ten Commandments (1956) — The filmmakers openly worked in the shadow of DeMille's epic — the project was pitched as its animated successor and they consciously measured their telling of Moses against it.
David Lean — The directors cited studying Lean's live-action epics for their widescreen scale and sweeping desert compositions.