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Six Hundred Consultants for One Animated Film

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Six Hundred Consultants for One Animated Film

Animated features rarely undergo formal theological review, but DreamWorks treated The Prince of Egypt as an exception from the start. Before a script was finalized, the studio brought in more than 600 religious leaders, scholars and consultants spanning Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions, the three faiths that each hold Moses as a central prophetic figure, to weigh in on how the Exodus narrative should be handled on screen.

The consultation shaped choices large and small: the decision not to show the face of God directly, consistent with a reading several of the involved traditions share; the handling of the tenth plague, the death of Egypt's firstborn sons, with restraint rather than spectacle; and an unusually careful afterword acknowledging that the film is "an adaptation of the story told in the Book of Exodus," a framing meant to signal interpretive choices rather than a claim to strict literalism.

The result was a film that, unusually for a major studio animated release, drew endorsement rather than controversy from religious communities on its release, and one that DreamWorks has cited since as a model for handling scripturally significant material responsibly rather than avoiding it, a markedly different posture from the studio's prior expectation, going in, that religious subject matter would be a commercial risk.

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