The Prince Of Egypt (General) General Release
The Prince Of Egypt marks the latest salvo in the war between the Disney Corporation and David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks. Already this year, the two studios have produced rival meteorite-hits-Earth disaster movies (Deep Impact and Armageddon) and digitally animated insect comedies (Antz and the forthcoming A Bug's Life). Although it doesn't compete quite so directly with a specific Disney title, The Prince Of Egypt is Dreamworks' most important challenge yet to the Mighty Mouse, on its home turf of classical animation. Katzenberg - who was responsible for the animation revival at Disney in the 1980s and 1990s - has claimed that the film is an attempt to reclaim the form for adult viewers, an ambitious project by any standards. So does Prince Of Egypt - opening on screens across the world this week in one of the largest-ever simultaneous releases - actually work?
Well, up to a point. Certainly this version of the story of Moses and the escape of the Jews from Egypt is visually stunning at times, with setpiece sequences that outstrip anything Disney has done in years. Most impressive are the earlier scenes of Pharaonic Egypt, which manage to be both epic in scale and brilliantly animated. But the inventiveness of these sequences, rendered in a chiarascuro palette of sepias and muted tones, is undercut by a typically slushy Disney-esque score and schmaltzy show tunes from Stephen Schwartz. The aspirations to seriousness are further undercut by shallow characterisation, both in the drawing and voices of the main characters. The film boasts a Hollywood A-list voice cast - Val Kilmer as Moses and Ralph Fiennes as Rameses, with Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock and Steve Martin among the starry supporting cast - a strategy which may help with the marketing, but doesn't add anything much to the finished product. The stated aspiration to seriousness requires more finesse in dealing with the nuances of character, but the weakest part of The Prince Of Egypt's visual style is in its close-ups and intimate scenes - too often, they just seem wooden, like the worst kind of Biblical education text.
Which raises the film's main difficulty - its Biblical origins. Cinema since the 1960s has all but abandoned attempting to make biblical epics, particularly those based on the Old Testament. Auteurs like Pasolini and Scorsese may have drawn on the Gospels, but the classic Cecil B. DeMille-style extravaganzas, so popular in the 1950s, have become objects of affectionate fun, at best. It almost seems perverse, therefore, for Dreamworks, in attempting to revolutionise one filmic form (animation) to try simultaneously to revive a long-moribund genre. It's hardly surprising that the resulting film is flawed but fascinating, both in conception and execution.
Katzenberg has cited David Lean and Akira Kurosawa as inspirations (interestingly, Disney made exactly the same claims for its most recent animated epic, Mulan), but the most obvious comparisons are with DeMille, in particular his ponderous The Ten Commandments, which covers much the same terrain, and on which certain sequences in The Prince Of Egypt seem to be based almost frame-for-frame. Both movies share the virtue of magnificent spectacle and the vice of grandiose self-importance.
The story itself, with the God of the Jews raining famine and pestilence down on the Egyptians, isn't exactly easy meat for the touchy-feely 1990s, and the killing of the first-born is particularly chillingly handled. The film-makers appear to have difficulties cramming the narrative into a 100-minute movie (DeMille took nearly twice as long, mind you, and to no good effect). It's not clear quite how much input Steven Spielberg had into the production, but it might be interesting to view The Prince Of Egypt in a line of films from Schindler's List through Amistad to Saving Private Ryan, which all attempt to handle questions of morality in extreme situations of racial or national conflict, and two of which reflect Spielberg's increasing pre-ocupation with his own Judaism. Like those films, Prince Of Egypt has moments of astonishing skill and power, undermined by formulaic sentimentality.
