The Prince of Egypt (1998)

There's a moment in The Prince of Egypt where the morning after the final plague, a devastated Egyptian mother sings a quiet, broken reprise of the lullaby that opened the film. It lasts maybe thirty seconds. And it is, without question, one of the most quietly devastating things I have ever seen in an animated film. It also made me deeply uncomfortable about everything I'd just watched. That tension, between the film being a staggering artistic achievement and something I found morally troubling, is basically where I've lived since the credits rolled.

Let's start with what's undeniable. This film is gorgeous. The way light behaves throughout, shimmering off the Nile, flickering through torchlit palace corridors, blazing and churning during the parting of the Red Sea, gives it a painterly, almost spiritual quality. It looks like a living fresco. For 1998, this is animation pushed to its absolute limits, and honestly it holds up better than a lot of what's come since. There's a weight and grandeur to every frame that you don't always get even from bigger budgets today.

The music matches it. "Deliver Us" opens the film with genuine chills. "When You Believe" soars exactly when it's supposed to. The score wraps everything in a kind of orchestral reverence that makes you sit up straighter in your seat. And the voice cast is exceptional across the board. Val Kilmer pulls off something remarkable, voicing both Moses and the voice of God, and making both feel distinct and real. Ralph Fiennes brings genuine ache to Rameses, and that's crucial, because the film's emotional centre isn't the miracles or the plagues. It's the friendship between two brothers, and the unbearable cost of what tears them apart. You feel that bond. You feel its collapse. That's where the real heartbreak lives.

It reminded me, in some ways, of what I love about The Hunchback of Notre Dame, another animated film from around that era that took its subject matter seriously and went to genuinely dark places that most studios would've softened. Both films understand that real drama requires real stakes and real pain.

But here's where it gets complicated for me, and I want to be honest about this rather than brush past it. The story is the story of Exodus, and I came to it without much prior knowledge of the plagues or the Passover narrative. Taken on its own terms, outside of religious faith, the final plague is deeply disturbing. Every firstborn child in Egypt dies. Thousands of innocent children, killed as leverage, as collective punishment. And the film frames this as divine justice, as the necessary price of liberation. It's not shy about the Egyptian grief. That lullaby reprise makes sure of it. But it still positions all of it as righteous, as the unavoidable mechanics of Moses's destiny.

Strip away the specific religious context, and if this exact plot were happening in any other fictional universe, those actions would be the villain's. That moral dissonance sits heavily with me. It doesn't make the film less powerful, but it does make it more complicated than I think it sometimes gets credit for being. Beautiful and troubling can both be true at once.

What I keep coming back to is this: the craft here is close to flawless. The artistry, the performances, the music, the sheer ambition of what the animators attempted and achieved, all of it earns enormous respect. It's the kind of film that reminds you what the medium is capable of when nobody's playing it safe.

Three and a half stars. A landmark, packed with artistry and genuine emotion. But it asks you to accept things that, stripped of faith, are ethically uncomfortable. I think it's worth sitting with that discomfort rather than waving it away. The film itself doesn't quite manage that. But it gets close enough to matter.

Rating: ★★★½  | Year: 1998  | Watched: 2025-09-20

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