The Prince of Egypt

Three directors, Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells, take the book of Exodus and draw it by hand, with songs, in 99 minutes. That is a large ambition and The Prince of Egypt gets most of the way there. The pictures are as fine as anything in feature animation, the two men at its centre are acted rather than merely voiced, and the story is told with a seriousness children’s films of its era rarely risked. What holds it back is inherited machinery: songs built to a template, and two comic priests who never find out what film they are in.

Darek Gogol designs an Egypt of flat planes and enormous verticals. Seti’s statues run out of the top of the frame, the brick pits are the colour of dust, and the palace is a warm ochre that goes cold at night. The opening number has slaves dragging a stone head up a ramp while soldiers take their infant sons, and a mother sets her baby in a basket on the Nile. The basket goes under a barge, past crocodiles, between the legs of hippos, and a small girl runs along the bank after it. We had seen this story in Sunday school and in DeMille’s robes and did not expect it to get to us. It did, inside eight minutes, and it was the girl running that did it.

Val Kilmer plays Moses as a young man who has never had to want anything, and the voice loses that ease by degrees as he learns what his family’s house is built on. Ralph Fiennes is better still. His Rameses is an heir who has been told once, by Patrick Stewart’s Seti, that he could be the weak link that breaks the dynasty, and every decision he takes afterwards is a man trying not to be. Early on the two race chariots through the city and knock the nose off a temple; later they stand on opposite sides of a throne room and the same two voices have nothing left in common. Stewart has one scene, explaining a massacre in the tone of a man discussing drainage, that is the most frightening thing in the film.

Hans Zimmer’s underscore is the better half of the music: brass, a large choir, a low drum under the desert, and a habit of going quiet when the images get big. The songs follow the shape every animated musical of the decade followed, the hero’s song of doubt, the wise man’s counsel, the duet of hope, and Miriam and Tzipporah’s duet is sung well without sounding like anything but the number the film owed. The exception is the plagues. Nick Fletcher cuts locusts, hail, frogs and a river turning red against the two brothers singing at each other from opposite ends of the city, and for four minutes song, image and story pull the same way.

Then there are Hotep and Huy. Steve Martin and Martin Short voice Seti’s priests as a double act with a song of smoke and stage magic that stops the film dead to remind everyone it is a cartoon. It is not badly done. It is in the wrong film, and each time they came back we felt the seriousness the directors had worked for drain away. The writers, Philip LaZebnik and Nicholas Meyer, also have to fit Exodus into 99 minutes, which means the desert, the marriage and the return to Egypt happen in the middle twenty. Michelle Pfeiffer’s Tzipporah gets one spiky scene, brought bound into the palace and biting, before she is a wife, and Danny Glover’s Jethro, the one warm adult in the story, gets a song and a wave goodbye.

Against its rivals it stands well. Disney’s musicals of the same decade were built to be liked; this one is built to be believed, and it treats slavery as slavery rather than a condition the songs will cure. DreamWorks went on to Shrek (2001) and a long career of winking at the audience. It never made another film this straight-faced, and it should have.

It carries a PG, and parents should know what that covers: the first ten minutes show infants carried off to the river, in outline, and the plagues are not softened. A child who can manage that gets a real film rather than a nursery one. Watch it on the largest screen in the house, because Gogol’s frames were drawn to be looked up at, and put the priests’ song down to the cost of doing business.