Upon its release in 1998, the animated feature film The Prince of Egypt became an instant classic. Inspired by Cecile B. de Mille’s The Ten Commandments, the DreamWorks classic tells the story of the Israelite Exodus and their time in Egypt through the lens of the life of Moses.
Dreamwork’s The Prince of Egypt worked to combine the story of Exodus along with the aesthetic of ancient Egyptian art in order to create a modern blend of the two that would appeal to wide audiences. The film used the brotherly bond of Moses and Rameses to create not only a familiar sense of family and relationship but to also further exaggerate the strife and implications of the story (the idea of good versus evil).
The film is filled with Egyptian artwork and inspired scenes, and as a result, it creates its own perception of the ancient lifestyle and societal system.
One of the things that has always made The Prince of Egypt stand out to me is the movies overall art-style and detail. Specifically, the setting and “backdrop” that the movie has for its scenes. It’s obvious that the ancient world of Egyptian architecture was looked at for inspiration when the artists who worked on the film created the setting.
The Prince of Egypt is a 1998 American animated musical drama film directed by Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner, and Simon Wells, and written by Philip LaZebnik, from a story by Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook.
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It is the first traditionally animated film from DreamWorks Animation, and the first to be animated entirely in-house at DWA Glendale after Amblimation was closed in 1997. The film is an adaptation of the Book of Exodus and follows the life of Moses from being a prince of Egypt to a prophet chosen by God to carry out his ultimate destiny of leading the Hebrews out of Egypt. It features songs written by Stephen Schwartz and a score composed by Hans Zimmer.
Prince of Egypt Pencil tests
The Genesis of a Vision
DreamWorks co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg had frequently suggested an animated adaptation of the 1956 film The Ten Commandments while working for The Walt Disney Company, and he decided to put the idea into production after leaving Disney and co-founding DreamWorks Pictures in 1994.
Katzenberg had wanted to tackle "bigger-than-life stories", like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Terminator and Lawrence of Arabia.
The Prince of Egypt was "written" throughout the story process. Beginning with a starting outline, story supervisors Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook led a team of fourteen storyboard artists and writers as they sketched out the entire film-sequence by sequence. Once the storyboards were approved, they were put into the Avid Media Composer digital editing system by editor Nick Fletcher to create a "story reel" or animatic.
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After casting of the voice talent concluded, dialogue recording sessions began. For the film, the actors recorded individually in a studio under guidance by one of the three directors. The voice tracks were to become the primary aspect as to which the animators built their performances.
Because DreamWorks was concerned about theological accuracy, Katzenberg decided to call in Biblical scholars, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim theologians, and Arab American leaders to help his film be more accurate and faithful to the original story.
To make the project, DreamWorks employed artists who had worked for Walt Disney Feature Animation and Amblimation, totaling a crew of 350 people from 34 countries.
Visual Development: Crafting the Look of Ancient Egypt
Art directors Kathy Altieri and Richard Chavez and Production Designer Derek Gogol led a team of nine visual development artists in setting a visual style for the film that was representative of the time, the scale, and the architectural style of Ancient Egypt.
Character designers Carter Goodrich, Carlos Grangel and Nico Marlet worked on setting the design and overall look of the characters. Drawing on various inspirations for the widely known characters, the team of character designers worked on designs that had a more realistic feel than the usual animated characters up to that time.
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Both character design and art direction worked to set a definite distinction between the symmetrical, more angular look of the Egyptians versus the more organic, natural look of the Hebrews and their related environments.
The backgrounds department, headed by supervisors Paul Lasaine and Ron Lukas, oversaw a team of artists who were responsible for painting the sets/backdrops from the layouts.
The animation team for The Prince of Egypt, including 350 artists from 34 different nations, was primarily recruited both from Walt Disney Feature Animation, which had fallen under Katzenberg's auspices while at The Walt Disney Company, and from Amblimation, a defunct division of Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment.
As at Disney's, character animators were grouped into teams by character: for example, Kristof Serrand, as the supervising animator of Older Moses, set the acting style of the character and assigned scenes to his team.
There are 1,192 scenes in the film, and 1,180 contain work done by the special effects department, which animates everything in an animated scene which is not a character: blowing wind, dust, rainwater, shadows, etc.
Ancient Egyptian Art and its Influence on the Film
As in the book of Exodus the Egyptians were seen as cruel and hateful (particularly the Pharaoh), the movie needed to show this as well. Through the inspiration of ancient Egypt’s stylized relief carvings and what they showed about the culture the film was able to use this to its advantage for creating the movie.
Egyptian art is so easily recognizable because of its overall design and the simple fact that for thousands of years it remained relatively unchanged.
Much of what the modern world knows about Ancient Egypt can be attributed to Ancient Egyptian art. Everything from knowing what they did for a living, what they held dear and even the clothes they wore.
The guidelines for art became known as the canon of proportions: a set of ideal mathematical ratios based on measurements, as in the proportions between the basic elements of the human body.
One of the most easily attributed art styles to ancient Egyptian culture are relief carvings/sculpture.
Because relief carvings were painted, it was necessary for the colors to be of importance to the piece in order to enhance its meaning. Certain colors were imbued with specific powers or attributes that were linked to various gods. As a result, great power could be contained within an object if it was made or painted in meaningful colors.
As an example, gold was used for the color of the sun as well as god’s skin - it was linked with immortality; green and blue were used for plants and symbolized fertility and prosperity.
Not only was color important, so was the size of each person carved. Status played a role in the way someone would be depicted on the wall; the more important you were, the larger you were. When a Pharaoh would be incorporated into an image, he would always be larger than the other figures. This would show that he was of more importance, so more emphasis would be given towards his proportion. It would also indicate that the Pharaoh held god-like powers, because of his “larger than life” appearance.
The lesser important people in society, such as wives, children, servants, and animals would be smaller in scale to further emphasize their lower status.
Stele of the Sculptor Userwer is a prominent piece of ancient Egyptian art as well as in the film for several reasons which will be discussed further below. The stele is known as a personal monument because it was meant to preserve the memory of the deceased as well as to inspire the still living to make offerings.
It consists of 3 levels, one large upper block with five bands of hieroglyphs, beneath that is two registers that contain figures which are identified with inscriptions. It may have come from the 12th dynasty and it may have been set up at Abydos, which is near the cult center of Osiris (the God of the dead).
The two bands of figures show Userwer among other members of his family. Userwer sits at a table piled high with offerings of food. Behind him is his wife Satdepetnetjer, and facing him on the other side of the offering table is Satameni, a standing woman also identified as his wife.
There’s a possibility that Userwer had two wives at the same time, however there’s potential that one of them in the register was Userwer’s first and deceased wife. Across from Userwer and his wives is a second table that’s piled with food, another couple is sitting there; identified as his parents. They’re named Senkhonsu (the father) and Satnebniut (the mother). Across from the parent’s side of the table is Userwer’s son Sneferuweser.
The lowest register consists of a row of eight standing figures, all facing toward Senkhonsu and Satnebniut. They are identified as “his son, Horuser; his daughter, Satwedja; his daughter, Satseri; his daughter, Imery; his daughter, Ankhyt; his daughter, Satnebniut: His father, Userwer: his male relative Nebniut.”
The hieroglyphs of the upper and topmost block read: “O, living ones who are on the earth who pass by this tomb, as your deities love and favor you, may you say: A thousand of bread and beer, a thousand of cattle and birds, a thousand of alabaster [vessels] and clothes, a thousand of offerings and provisions that go forth before Osiris”
Because the stele was not completed, it suggests that Userwer was carving it for himself, however his sudden death left it unfinished. What makes Stele of the Sculptor Userwer so different is not its figures or inscriptions, it’s the fact that it was left unfinished; with the process of its design still visible. The stele uses a type of carving called sunken relief.
Stele of the Sculptor Userwer.
A variation of relief carving, found almost exclusively in ancient Egyptian sculpture, is sunken relief (also called incised relief), in which the carving is sunk below the level of the surrounding surface and is contained within a sharply incised contour line that frames it with a powerful line of light and shade.
Along with this type of carving: Egyptian artists followed a set of fairly strict conventions, often based on conceptual principles rather than on the observation of the natural world with an eye to rendering it in life-like fashion.
Of course, these strict conventions are better known as the canon of proportions. During the Middle Kingdom, the canon became linked to the use of a square grid, so that standing figures consisted of 18 squares between their soles and hairline, and certain parts of the body were related to particular grid horizontals.
In standing figures the top of the knee lay on line 6, the lower part of the buttocks was on line 9, the small of the back was on 11, the nipple was on 14, where the neck met the shoulders would be on line 16, and finally the bottom of the nose was on line 17. This relates to the stele because both use the canon of proportions.
The movie transforms into a sunken relief carving as it acts out the scene. All the lower status characters shown are the same size, and they are depicted with their torsos facing the viewer while their heads are turned to profile. This was the common way for figures to be carved. Just like the stele, the scene does not make use of depth perception when it comes to the figures on the walls, they are left to be depicted as two-dimensional.
In addition to the perspective, the figures were not given any type of emotion, as the ancient Egyptians believed emotions to be fleeting.
This scene is important because it’s the first and only time in the film that sunken relief carvings are shown to the degree that they’re used for in this scene. It is also significant because it portrays the characters of the film as actual carvings, and they take on the idea of ancient Egypt’s artist ideals about scale, repetition, color, and perfection; the film uses this to its advantage as it casts those artistic choices to make a point about each character’s role.
For example, as well as to further explain: In the scene, the characters shown in relief carvings (Moses and Seti I) are portrayed differently. Seti I is shown according to his status, since he was the current Pharaoh at the time of the scene his figure used hierarchical scale. This change in size showed several things, the first is that he was Pharaoh and therefore more important and valuable than the others in society.
The army that Seti I had marching forward are all smaller than the Pharaoh. other. It appears as though the army was displaying the canon of proportions as all of them are the same height, their legs and arms are in the same positions, and their bodies are shown forward facing while their faces are turned to profile. This echoes the idealistic, however un-individualized and “robotic” appearance that many Egyptian relief carvings showed.
The Prince of Egypt incorporated the ancient Egyptian stylized representation of figures into one of its most important scenes. The choice of using sunken relief in addition to other ancient Egyptian artistic constructs as a medium to convey the message is demonstrating that the Pharaoh, although powerful, is not filled with human emotion. Not only is this comparable to the way Egyptians wanted their art (as well as their Pharaohs) to seem, it also heavily aided in helping the film to prove its own message regarding the authority and ignorance of the Pharaoh in context to the story-line.
Architectural Inspiration: Monuments and Buildings
So for this post we’re going to look at two different scenes, and the monuments/buildings that are in the scenes and how they reflect ancient Egyptian architecture.
One of the most recognizable monuments left behind from ancient Egypt is the Great Sphinx. It makes an appearance in the movie in a single scene. In a depression to the south of Khafre’s pyramid at Giza near Cairo sits a huge creature with the head of a human and a lion’s body. This monumental statue, the first truly colossal royal sculpture in Egypt, known as the Great Sphinx, is a national symbol of Egypt. The Great Sphinx has before been accepted as dating back 4,500 years, however newer discoveries and information has suggested that it could be as old as the 4th dynasty. Bringing speculation to what Pharaoh actually had it built (Khafre or potentially Khufu).
Now that we have the basic knowledge of what the statue is and how old it is, we can look at what it represents. It is a suggestion of shape-shifting, of metamorphosis, that is appropriate to the king who is uniquely, the link between mankind and the gods, and stands consistently on the threshold of these two worlds.
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