Although it remains to be seen if the public will embrace an animated musical drama based on the biblical book of Exodus, DreamWorks’ first self-produced animated feature suddenly is looking less dicey.
After all, if audiences flocked to see two separate colonies of talking insects (“Antz” and “A Bug’s Life”), no to mention “The Rugrats Movie” and “Mulan,” who’s to say they won’t come out in droves to watch “The Prince of Egypt”?
“I think all of us had the same first impression when it was pitched to us,” recalled Simon Wells, one of three directors on the project. “It was, `Let me get this straight, we’re going to make an animated Bible musical?’ Our challenge became, `How do we make a movie that we would want to see?’ And, that’s the bait we all rose to.”
Fortunately for the 435 artists who worked nearly four years on the project, “Prince” had the unflinching support of the high-powered triumvirate in charge of DreamWorks. They also were given between $70 million to $100 million–and probably much more, if you believe industry insiders–to get the job done right.
In Hollywood, the story of the creation of DreamWorks itself borders on the mythic.
In October 1994, Jeffrey Katzenberg–who had been the driving force behind the resurgence of Disney’s animation division, before leaving in anger over a rejected promotion–joined forces with entertainment industry titans Steven Spielberg and David Geffen to build a studio that would cater to creative dreams of artists, musicians and filmmakers. Each man invested $33 million of his own money in the start-up project.
The expectations for instantaneous greatness were enormous, even if there was skepticism about their choice of their first animated project.
“There never was any other story,” said Katzenberg. “We agreed on this story before we agreed to start DreamWorks. We actually decided that, if we started DreamWorks, this was such a good idea that it was going to be the first animated movie we would make.”
The decision to build the film around the relationship between Moses and Rameses evolved along the way, but Katzenberg’s vision and determination have remained remarkably consistent over the past four years.
“What I told people when I was trying to recruit them was that I thought this would be a great opportunity to tell the story of who the man Moses was,” he added. “To me, the thing I remembered learning about Moses is how he was a very humble and innocent Everyman. That he was flawed and never saw within himself the qualities of greatness. Yet, when he was suddenly challenged and given this impossible mission, he became a great leader.”
After luring many of Hollywood’s top-line animators, composers and filmmakers to DreamWorks to work on “Prince,” which opens Friday, and subsequent projects, Katzenberg gave them another mighty challenge. He literally wanted them to throw out the formulas and redefine the face of feature animation.
“These were ambitious people, all of whom had left other places to take on this opportunity and challenge,” stressed Katzenberg. “They were risk-takers, entrepreneurs, pioneers, and it didn’t scare them that nobody had done this before.”
At the first meeting with his new boss, Wells got a pretty good idea of how high Katzenberg at set the bar for “Prince.”
“Jeffrey had this book of illustrations by Gustave Dore and he was clutching it rather maniacally, saying, `Can we make a movie that looks like this . . . fabulously complicated and detailed?,’ ” the director said, sitting in his sketch-filled office at DreamWorks’ campuslike Glendale, Calif., studio. “That sort of expanded into, `Yeah, and can we paint it like Claude Monet, and shoot it like David Lean?’ . . . who are just the pinnacles of artistic achievement in their respective spheres. That forced us to look beyond animation . . . to discover what connects David Lean and Gustave Dore.”
Katzenberg admits that his goals were pretty lofty.
“Why bother, if you’re not going to set the bar high?” he argues. “The idea of bringing a Monet painting to life, with the stylization and characterization of Dore, and, then, trying to capture the size, the scale, the scope, the sense of cinema that David Lean brought to `Lawrence of Arabia,’ was something that had never been done before in an animated film. . . . The goal for our artists was to create a painted realism, as opposed to something photographically real (using computers).
“We wanted to bring a painting to life, and yet to retain the quality and the style that is unique to a painting that is done by hand. I’m proud that every single frame of a character acting in this movie has been drawn by hand.”
This means that, although digital technology played an essential role in “The Prince of Egypt,” none of the animated characters look as if they’ve escaped from the same computer that created the stars of “Antz” or “A Bug’s Life.”
The backgrounds and scenery are rendered, following lighting “paths” and color schemes specifically conceived to fit the tone of each event in the story.
The worlds of the Egyptians and Hebrews were designed, as well, to emphasize the contrasts between the two cultures. According to the production notes, Rameses’ city is mostly white and “hewn from stone with clean hard edges and sharp angles,” while the “small, winding, intimate milieu” of the Hebrews is made “with mud bricks and timber and worn by the elements”; likewise, the Egyptians are dressed in white with jewelry accents of gold, red and turquoise, while the Hebrews are in natural shades of brown and beige (only the Midianites, the desert tribe of Jethro and Tzipporah, wear vibrant colors).
To ensure that cultural realism would be invested in a story already familiar to us from the Bible and Cecil B. DeMille’s “The 10 Commandments,” several of the filmmakers traveled to Egypt to immerse themselves in the desert environment. Biblical scholars, theologians and historians versed in everything from wearing apparel to dance, tools to hieroglyphics, also were invited to lend their expertise to the production.
Even so, as a disclaimer notes, certain liberties were taken by the filmmakers to advance the story of the relationship between the two brothers. This wasn’t intended to come at the expense of anyone’s deeply held religious beliefs, however.
To prevent unnecessarily offending anyone, certain comic set pieces–including those involving court magicians voiced by Steve Martin and Martin Short–would be scratched from the original script, and there would certainly be no talking animals. The humor would come from the humanity of the characters and such competitive situations as a wild chariot race through the boys’ kingdom.
The half-dozen songs from Stephen Schwartz and Hans Zimmer all serve the purpose of advancing the drama. The story, Katzenberg insisted, wouldn’t stop to give the singers or characters their moment in the spotlight.
For instance, “Deliver Us”–performed by Ofra Haza and Eden Riegel–underscores the 7-minute prologue sequence, which introduces us to the main characters and finds the narrative flow. “Through Heaven’s Eyes,” sung by Brian Stokes Mitchell, plays over a montage showing Moses’ life after he splits from Rameses, takes up with Tzipporah in the desert and is charged by God–in the form of a burning bush and the voice of Val Kilmer, who also does Moses–to return to Egypt and free his people from bondage.
Students of animation might also notice that the faces of the characters are slightly different than they’re used to seeing in other films.
Instead of dividing the faces into three equal spaces–one-third for the eyes and forehead; one-third for the nose and cheeks; and one-third for the mouth and chin–lead animator William Salazar altered the formula to 30-40-30 percent. By elongating the middle of the face, the characters are given a “more realistic and engaging countenance,” and they are more readily able to express their emotions.
This isn’t to say that all future DreamWorks animated features will utilize this technique or others pioneered in “Prince of Egypt.” Katzenberg is emphatic that his animators won’t be limited to a house look or creative agenda.
“It would be really disappointing if we succeeded in breaking the mold here, then slipped into becoming a single DreamWorks’ style,” he said. “There are so many varieties of styles and stories to tell, and the exciting thing is to try lots of different things. I sure wouldn’t want to be making Bible stories for the next 50 years–not that we might not do another one many years down the road.
“The next movie we’re doing, `El Dorado,’ is an irrevent action comedy. It’s as different from `Prince of Egypt’ as `Prince of Egypt’ is different from what’s come before it. And, our next one is very different from that.”
On the other hand, if “The Prince of Egypt” becomes a hit, every other animation studio in town probably will have their own animated Bible music in production by Easter.
PARTING THE RED SEA: 3 YEARS FOR 7 MINUTES
Just as in Cecil B. DeMille’s epic film “The 10 Commandments,” much of the fascination in “Prince of Egypt” comes from the spectacular parting of the Red Sea. The 7-minute sequence took a total of three years, 22 effects artists and 318,000 computer-rendering hours to create, and required the creation of 600,000 digitally-generated refugees.
“We actually spent several months doing blue-sky research, asking the artists to think up totally crazy ideas and painting whatever came into their heads,” said Wells. “We cherrypicked. We had a couple of hundred pieces of great artwork these guys had produced over a few months and said, `Let’s have that, and that, and a couple of those.’ Then we compiled them all together.
“Paul Shardlow, one of the artists, produced a painting of Moses putting his staff into the sand, with the water pulling away in this circle. . . . Instead of the water somehow quietly rumbling back, it would be a dynamic, explosive thing.”
Another artist, Sam Michlap, suggested adding the shadowy visage of a whaleshark to the wall of blue water.
“It was one of those images where we looked at it and said, `This is cool,’ ” said Wells. “When we showed the pieces of art to Steven Spielberg, that’s the one he said was cool, as well.”
Technically, the splitting of the waters required a time-consuming frame-by-frame process–under the supervision of special-effects maestro Henry LaBounta (“Twister”) — integrating hand-drawn images with those developed using 3-D software and other computer-graphics-imaging techniques. If anything, it worked too well.
“At one point, when we were moving from visual development into production, it was looking great but too real,” said visual effects supervisor Dan Philips. “It was too photographic. It looked like we had cartoon characters in front of live action.
“We wanted to keep the complexity, match the color of the characters together, and then stylize the shape of the water. . . . The reason we went to all that trouble was that all of us had worked on films in the past where you did a fantastic piece of visual effects, and it’s both a success and a failure.”
Philips, who came to DreamWorks from Disney, worked on “Beauty and the Beast,” and cited the ballroom sequence in that film, as “looking really great, but also feeling as if you’re in a live-action ballroom. Then, boom, you’re back in the movie.
“We wanted viewers to stay in the film, and not be kicked out by some eye-popping effects and have to drop back into something different afterwards.”
IS `PRINCE’ APPROPRIATE FOR LITTLE KIDS?
Although children 7 and under will be able to stick with “The Prince of Egypt” story, the target audience is preteens, teens and adults. Some of the special effects–including those created to represent the plagues–could be too intense for some children in the age group usually attracted to animated films.
“The plagues have to be scary, to force Rameses to let the Hebrews go . . . but they also have to be beautiful because they’re from God,” emphasized special-effects supervisor Doug Ikeler, sitting at his Silicon Graphics computer. Among other things, Ikeler’s team was responsible for infesting Egypt with 7 million swarming locusts, turning water into blood and creating a motion cycle for the horde of bugs shown crawling out of a loaf of bread, causing it to disintegrate before our eyes.
“When you think of normal animated pictures, the good guys are the good guys and the bad guys are the bad guys,” said Simon Wells, one of three directors on the project. “It’s very simple and straightforward, because animated movies traditionally are aimed at toddlers, and it has to be a thing that’s clear to them. Our protagonists and antagonists are complex, layered characters.
“You understand the pressure that’s on Rameses to make him behave the way he does, and his sense of betrayal at what Moses is doing. And you understand Moses’ deep conflict: On the one hand, he has a mission that he absolutely believes is the right thing to do; on the other hand, to achieve that mission, he has to tear down the thing his brother loves more than anything else.”
Because of the subject matter, DreamWorks has restricted its non-advertising marketing efforts for “Prince”–which will open on more than 7,500 screens in nearly 40 countries, virtually simultaneously–to a ticket promotion with Wal-Mart, some book tie-ins and a making-of special to be shown on NBC.
There will be no “Prince of Egypt” Happy Meals, Ramseses action figures or cuddly Baby Moses plush toys.
Without these additional revenue streams, the studio is hoping that religious leaders–hundreds of whom were given early screenings–will spread the word on the picture.
