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Prince of Egypt
Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner,
Simon Wells (1998)
Moses is a towering figure in three world religions. His story is foundational to Judaism, bringing not only the Torah but the creation of the people of Israel. Christians tend to relegate him to “one of the stories in the Old Testament”, or use him as a foreshadowing of Christ, but his is still a defining moment in God’s dealings with humanity, and the inspiration for many liberation movements.
The Qur’an meanwhile talks more of Moses than any other prophet before Muhammad, though, interestingly, it sees him as a prophet and lawgiver, and has little interest in deliverance from slavery.
Dreamworks thus had a pretty huge audience to appeal to when making The Prince of Egypt, a cartoon that follows the life of Moses from the bullrushes to the other side of the Red Sea. Equally huge, was the potential for upsetting large numbers of them, which is why the makers apparently consulted 600 religious advisers. The result is a film which, they hoped, was “true to the essence, values, and integrity of a story that is a cornerstone of faith for millions of people”.
I suppose a story that also deals with slavery, murder, drowning, Zionism, and two episodes of mass-infanticide presents challenges for family entertainment (though Sunday-school teachers have been dealing with that for years).
The main reworking of the biblical story concerns Moses’s relationship with Pharaoh. In Exodus, Moses is adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter as a baby, but as an adult has no apparent relationship with the new Pharaoh. The film makes an imaginative leap by making Moses his adopted brother. The young Rameses is a Prince Hal figure, grieving his father with his recklessness. The young Moses, if not Falstaff exactly, is nevertheless the inseparable buddy who brings out the worst in Rameses.
This brings plenty of high jinks into the first part of the film, such as wild chariot-racing through building works. (In every story ever set in ancient Egypt, the hero knocks the nose off the sphinx. This is how it happens here.) But when it comes to the “Let my people go!” scenes, this relationship adds a whole new dimension to the story. Moses is not just a humble representative of the oppressed people of God, standing before the dictator of the world. He is a friend and a brother who is turning his back on friendship and family, and betraying class, nation, and religion. The human struggle adds welcome depth to the story.
Another, smaller change to the Exodus story is that when Moses flees Egypt after killing a slave driver in defence of a Hebrew slave, the death is an accident. It seems that the biblical writers were less concerned than those of Hollywood to make their heroes sympathetic. Or is it that the definition of a hero has changed?
In many ways, the film follows the familiar Disney-cartoon style; and yet there is something less child-friendly about it. Many of the scenes were filmed with animal sidekicks — Moses’s two dogs and Rameses’s evil cat — but these were almost entirely cut. Meanwhile, the visit of the angel of death brings in a grisly reality likely to alarm parents and fascinate children. Thus Dreamworks steers away from the removal of Grimm-ness —the formula that Disney applied to its classic children’s stories.
The filmmakers also managed to avoid the toning down of the religious message into one of self-belief and self-fulfilment, as in The Lion King, or Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice’s Joseph: “Anyone from anywhere can make it if they get a lucky break.”
It’s interesting to note that God is voiced by Val Kilmer, who also plays Moses. This might suggest that God is a voice in his head, or, more subtly, that the voice of God is always channelled through one’s own voice. “We wanted to make it something that was personal to Moses,” explained the co-director, Brenda Chapman.
The animation has been highly praised. A combination of new computer techniques with traditional handiwork brings out the best of both when depicting the grandeur of Egypt or the spectacle of the plagues and the Red Sea crossing. But perhaps the most memorable sequence is the simple one where a wall-painting comes alive to reveal to Moses the story of his past.
This is revisited when, just before the Passover, Pharaoh’s son interrupts his talk with Moses, standing in front of the wall-painting of the infanticide. By the genocide of one generation and the stubbornness of the next, the Egyptians had brought what was coming upon themselves. But the morality of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children — “good enough for divinities [but] scorned by average human nature”, in Thomas Hardy’s words — is a question the film does not grapple with. |
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