When Pharaoh and his boys clamber in their chariots across the same passageway, only Charlie Tuna is around to listen to their complaints. There's no revisionist carping about Red/Reed Sea translation confusion: This is the big wet one, baby, and Moses parts it neatly as Elvis parted his first hairdo for Ed Sullivan. The people are ultimately let go, but then Pharaoh goes after them. When Pharaoh won't listen, God sends bugs and frogs. Upon discovering his true Hebrew identity, he suffers a crisis, flees and returns with the best slogan ever written: Let My People Go. He is raised to privilege in the court as brother to the Pharaoh to be. We begin by watching Baby Moses basket-surf the Nile, to be rescued by an Egyptian princess. Primarily concerned with the first part of the Book of Exodus you know, the part with all the special effects it leaves out that dreary 40 years in the wilderness and, being aimed at families, equally omits the shimmy-shim-sham danced about the feet of the Golden Calf. You don't see faith systems in opposition so much as idea systems. In that sense, it feels more political and cultural than religious. If nothing else it's a wonderful essay on the meaning of freedom and the courage it takes to wrestle it from despots.

The new animated feature from Dreamworks SKG gets that.

Oh, and also: Judaism and Christianity, democracy and baseball, to say nothing of Shakespeare, Bogart and Faulkner. Really, so much of it begins with Moses: the concept of freedom, the sense of the worth of the individual, the idea of God as an abstract ideal of morality instead of a batch of dog-faced bullies, commandments one through ten, even that inconvenient one about the neighbor's wife, and the coolness of beards. Is 'The Prince of Egypt' a good movie or the most expensive Sunday school filmstrip ever made? My enthusiasm for Western man is so primal that I lean toward the former. Moses leads the Hebrews out of Egypt in 'The Prince of Egypt.'Ĭontains powerful suggestions of the death of children as both state policy and the work of God

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