The Prince of Egypt is a 1998 animated musical directed by Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells, DreamWorks Animation's adaptation of the Book of Exodus. It follows Moses from his upbringing as an adopted prince of Egypt through his discovery of his Hebrew birth, his exile, his call at the burning bush, and his return to confront Pharaoh Rameses, the brother who raised him, over the freedom of the enslaved Israelites. Stephen Schwartz wrote the songs and Hans Zimmer the score. It premiered in Los Angeles on December 16, 1998 and grossed $218 million worldwide, the most successful non-Disney animated feature of its time.
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Subject Matter
Religious Subject MatterSourced to the subject's own accountA musical retelling of the Exodus narrative shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam: the infant Moses set adrift on the Nile, his raising in Pharaoh's household, the ten plagues, and the parting of the sea. DreamWorks consulted more than 600 clergy and scholars across Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities during production, and the studio credits that process with keeping the film's handling of the material broadly acceptable across all three traditions that hold Moses as a prophet. 1 Scholarly ReceptionSourced to the subject's own accountReviews were largely positive, praising the animation, songs and score; it remains widely used in religious education settings as an accessible introduction to the Exodus narrative for younger audiences, a use its makers' own interfaith consultation process was explicitly aimed at supporting. 1 Production
Release YearSourced to the subject's own account DirectorSourced to the subject's own accountBrenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells 1 Country of OriginSourced to the subject's own account FormatSourced to the subject's own account Learn More
Six Hundred Consultants for One Animated Film
Animated features rarely undergo formal theological review, but DreamWorks treated The Prince of Egypt as an exception from the start. Before a script was finalized, the studio brought in more than 600 religious leaders, scholars and consultants spanning Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions, the three faiths that each hold Moses as a central prophetic figure, to weigh in on how the Exodus narrative should be handled on screen.
The consultation shaped choices large and small: the decision not to show the face of God directly, consistent with a reading several of the involved traditions share; the handling of the tenth plague, the death of Egypt's firstborn sons, with restraint rather than spectacle; and an unusually careful afterword acknowledging that the film is "an adaptation of the story told in the Book of Exodus," a framing meant to signal interpretive choices rather than a claim to strict literalism.
The result was a film that, unusually for a major studio animated release, drew endorsement rather than controversy from religious communities on its release, and one that DreamWorks has cited since as a model for handling scripturally significant material responsibly rather than avoiding it, a markedly different posture from the studio's prior expectation, going in, that religious subject matter would be a commercial risk.
The Same Exodus, Told Twice, Forty Years Apart
The Prince of Egypt tells substantially the same story Cecil B. DeMille had already put on screen in The Ten Commandments in 1956, forty-two years earlier, and the contrast between the two says as much about changing audiences as it does about the underlying material. DeMille's film runs nearly four hours as a widescreen historical epic aimed at adult moviegoers, built around Charlton Heston's Moses as a towering, largely settled heroic figure from the outset.
DreamWorks' version compresses the same span of Moses's life into ninety minutes as a musical aimed primarily, though not exclusively, at family audiences, and spends much more of its runtime on Moses's interior uncertainty, his grief at discovering the truth of his birth and the cost to his relationship with Rameses, the brother he was raised alongside, before he ever reaches the burning bush. Where DeMille's Moses arrives already resolved, DreamWorks' Moses is still working out who he is meant to become.
Both films draw on the Book of Exodus as their base text while filling gaps the text itself leaves open, DeMille far more freely, inventing entire romantic subplots absent from Exodus, DreamWorks more conservatively, mostly restricting its invention to interior emotional beats rather than new events. Read side by side, the two adaptations are less a matter of one being truer to the source than of two different eras choosing different aspects of the same ancient story to foreground.
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Associated With
This source names Egypt directly: "The Prince of Egypt is a 1998 animated musical directed by Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells, DreamWorks Animation's adaptation of the Book of Exodus."
This source names Israelites directly: "him, over the freedom of the enslaved Israelites."
This source names Los Angeles directly: "It premiered in Los Angeles on December 16, 1998 and grossed $218 million worldwide, the most successful non-Disney animated feature of its time."
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