🎬 Movie🎬 Tweens · Ages 11–13Animation

The Prince of Egypt (1998)

Name: The Prince of Egypt
Released: 1998

About This Movie

The story of Moses unfolds as sweeping animated epic, from his childhood as an Egyptian prince to his confrontation with Pharaoh and the exodus of the Hebrew people. The scale of the animation is staggering, with parting seas, divine fire, and vast desert landscapes rendered in a style that feels closer to classical oil painting than Saturday morning cartoons. The musical numbers, especially "When You Believe," soar with genuine emotional power.

Why It's a Classic

DreamWorks assembled an extraordinary team for this film, including composer Hans Zimmer, songwriter Stephen Schwartz, and a voice cast featuring Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, and Sandra Bullock. The studio treated the source material with unusual seriousness, consulting with over 600 religious leaders, scholars, and theologians from Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions during production. The relationship between Moses and Rameses is the film's dramatic engine, portraying two brothers on opposite sides of an impossible conflict with genuine sympathy for both. The Red Sea sequence remains one of the most technically ambitious scenes in hand-drawn animation history, combining traditional cel animation with early CGI water simulation. Director Brenda Chapman and her team deliberately pushed the visual style toward a painterly, widescreen aesthetic that distinguished the film from Disney's house style.

Fun Fact

The parting of the Red Sea sequence alone required over 318,000 hours of rendering time on the computers available in 1998. DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg considered this his most personal project and lobbied for years to get it made. The film used a combination of traditional hand-drawn animation and CGI that was cutting-edge at the time; the crowd scenes of fleeing Hebrews were among the first to use motion-capture data to create realistic animated masses of people. Val Kilmer voiced both Moses and God, a deliberate choice meant to suggest an internal spiritual connection.

Parent Note

Rated PG with intense sequences depicting the plagues of Egypt, including the death of the firstborn children, which is handled with restraint but genuine emotional gravity. There are scenes of slavery, forced labor, and the implied killing of Hebrew infants. The religious content is presented respectfully and serves the dramatic narrative. This film works for families of all faiths and none, though younger or more sensitive tweens may find the plague sequences disturbing.