The sad fact is that The Price of Egypt is actually terrible theology, unless you define "good theology" as "carefully dabbing out all the unpalatable material in the Torah so that it won't offend modern viewers". Which is why The Prince of Egypt was briefly banned in a few Muslim countries with particularly strict laws on creating artistic depictions of prophets, but that's mostly just trivia. Oh, and the closing card, which points out using the primary texts of three different major religions that Moses is regarded as a dominant figure not just by Jews, but by Christians and Muslims as well. Except that Katzenberg and company were obviously trying to pull a Passion of the Christ on their audience, making a rollicking entertainment that doubled as a spiritual lesson, at least to judge from the opening title card, which solemnly and neurotically assures us that though liberties have been taken with the letter of the story, the spirit remains the same. For some of us, this might not seem like such a big thing: Disney focused on medieval European fairy tales, DreamWorks was going to dabble in ancient Middle Eastern fairy tales. "Good faith" - a curious term to use, for of course The Prince of Egypt is unique in being an adaptation of the first part of Exodus, making it the most overtly religious major animated film ever produced (for all its founder's all-American conservatism, Disney generally shied away from actively Christian stories). But for a little while, at least, the house that Katzenberg built was still making a good-faith effort to create sincere, engaging art.
It also proved to be the start down a dead end path for DreamWorks, which tried to do the "male protagonist adventure film" thing for a few years until realising that there was much more money in unendurable slurries of pop culture jokes and soulless post-modernism. In the end, The Prince of Egypt turned out to be the highest-grossing animated film produced by any studio other than Disney, for a little while at least. And just to be sure, it was given a budget higher than any animated film had ever received, even in the days when Disney was pitching huge amounts of money at any project that would stand still. That little scuffle was nothing at all to DreamWorks Animation's second feature, one that sought to meet and top Disney at its own game: a traditionally-animated musical about a young man finding a better life, taken from folklore. Disney handily won that first engagement both at the box office and in history, with the aid of by Pixar Animation Studios - brought into the company fold by Katzenberg himself, which must surely have galled him - for although A Bug's Life might be oftener counted among Pixar's weakest films than its strongest, when was the last time you remember having any conversation at all about Antz?
#The prince of egypt 1998 full movie movie#
The first battle came in the fall of 1998, when both companies released computer-animated films about ants (according to a legend that seems too perfect to be true, John Lasseter pitched his ant movie in the very last meeting that Katzenberg attended as a Disney executive). Katzenberg's presence meant that DreamWorks would spend plenty of energy on animated films his personality meant that DreamWorks Animation would be devoted to the task of crushing Disney.
A man of his enviable talents would not remain untethered for long, and before the year was over Katzenberg had joined forces with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen to form a new entertainment company, DreamWorks SKG. I scorned this idea, of course, but for exactly the wrong reason: not because I was taken up in those days pot and surreptitious drinking and sex, and nice, normal things like that, but because I had already chosen my side in the Disney/DreamWorks war, and I wasn't going to see no god-damned Jeff Katzenberg movie, the fucker.ĭon Bluth's departure from the Walt Disney Company in the late '70s might have been prickly and contentious, but it didn't have anything on the bile-soaked blood feud between CEO Michael Eisner and studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg that came to a head in 1994, shortly before the release of Katzenberg's greatest financial triumph at Disney, The Lion King. Well do I remember when The Prince of Egypt opened: for it was 18 December, 1998, which happened to be my 17th birthday, * and I recall my mother asking if I wanted to see it. The second of two reviews request by Kara Wild with her donations to the Carry On Campaign the first is here.
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