A site I like visiting every once in a while is
https://www.blu-ray.com/ , as it's a good place for news on a lot of releases that slip through the cracks, but one of the things I've taken to recently is this little bargain round-up they have at the top of the page that displays Blu-Ray sales across the internet, mostly on Amazon. And it was there that I saw a recent BluRay on sale for a film I haven't seen in several decades (and didn't know it WAS on BluRay): The Prince of Egypt.
It was on sale for $7 and I remembered liking it, so I picked it up and now I've watched it. Yeah, this film holds up damn well, and it's probably my favorite Dreamworks film...though this BluRay is just about as half-assed as you can imagine. The video transfer is abysmal, apparently drawn from a late-90s DVD rather than the apparently-amazing 4K restoration unveiled last year at a major film festival. The video is extremely grainy, and the audio is pretty muffled, which is particularly an issue for a musical.
Disappointment with the video quality aside (though there is a pretty decent selection of legacy bonus features), I still quite like this movie. The music is excellent, even if the way the film leads into the songs is pretty blunt-force trauma. The animation wavers from "eh" to "pretty good", with the worst offender being the CG Dreamworks used for some of the more difficult shots. There is an amazing sequence where Moses dreams about the slaughter of the Hebrew children in the form of moving Egyptian Paintings reminiscent of Link Between Worlds's wall sequences. And, of course, the standout moment is the parting of the Red Sea, which is still a pretty damn impressive sequence even if the water sometimes looks like the T-1000 should be rising up from it.
As for the story, this is probably the best way you could adapt the Moses story, focusing on the bond between the brothers and the way their respective duties pull them apart. There's a surprisingly amount of quiet time in the film to just let moments hang and characters breath and contemplate. You don't really see that in animated films anymore. There's also actually an impressive amount of bite to this movie as well considering when it was made, as you see a fair amount of cruelty, violence, disease, and eventually child murder more or less on-screen (though the latter is handled very delicately).
Yeah, glad I saw it again.