Hot take: It’s the best opening number in an animated musical besides The Lion King‘s “Circle of Life.” Judge for yourself. Take “Deliver Us,” the film’s opening number that showed nothing less than the slaughter of every Hebrew baby in Egypt and Moses’ mother saving her son’s life. It didn’t hurt that its soundtrack stacks up against anything Disney has ever produced. It was the rare animated film that didn’t once talk down to its young audience. But 20 years later, that provocative imagery and adult themes are precisely why the film is remembered so fondly by those who came of age in the late ’90s/early 2000s. Those scenes may have frightened some children and put off parents who were not prepared for an animated musical to, well, go there. The Prince of Egypt pulled no punches in its depictions of biblical violence. Moses and Ramses got into their fair share of antics at the pharaoh’s palace, but Moses very clearly kills a man on screen and the 10 plagues are just as horrifying in animated form as the scriptures described them to be. The final product, however, was anything but a sanitized version of biblical events. That’s a precarious place to start for any film, animated or live-action. The mere act of trying to translate it into animation probably angered the more religiously inclined, who might have believed DreamWorks was making light of such an important parable. The Prince of Egypt had an uphill battle to climb with critics and audiences alike, as it is based on one of the most famous biblical texts of all time. The Prince of Egypt is 20 years old today, and upon further examination, its defining legacy is (among other things) being one of the first animated films to prove that the medium could do more than just entertain children. 16, 1998, it put out The Prince of Egypt, an animated musical based on the biblical tale of Moses leading the Hebrews out of enslavement in Egypt.Īt the time, critics were a bit confounded by it, as some felt it was too mature for kids and didn’t take its source material seriously enough to appease adults. In October, it put out Antz, an inferior version of A Bug’s Life that also has the unfortunate distinction of having a voice cast led by Woody Allen.
Pixar was around, but at that point had only put out Toy Story and A Bug’s Life and hadn’t quite established itself as the cartoon powerhouse it would become.Įnter DreamWorks in 1998. From 1996-98, it released The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules and Mulan, further cementing its stranglehold on that film genre.
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The House of Mouse had earned what was essentially a monopoly on the animated movie market through years of groundbreaking work like Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid. Once thought to be a medium purely for telling children’s stories, DreamWorks Animation’s biblical epic redefined what the cartoon was capable of.Īnimation circa 1998 was ruled by Disney with an iron fist.
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