The Prince of Egypt tells substantially the same story Cecil B. DeMille had already put on screen in The Ten Commandments in 1956, forty-two years earlier, and the contrast between the two says as much about changing audiences as it does about the underlying material. DeMille's film runs nearly four hours as a widescreen historical epic aimed at adult moviegoers, built around Charlton Heston's Moses as a towering, largely settled heroic figure from the outset.
DreamWorks' version compresses the same span of Moses's life into ninety minutes as a musical aimed primarily, though not exclusively, at family audiences, and spends much more of its runtime on Moses's interior uncertainty, his grief at discovering the truth of his birth and the cost to his relationship with Rameses, the brother he was raised alongside, before he ever reaches the burning bush. Where DeMille's Moses arrives already resolved, DreamWorks' Moses is still working out who he is meant to become.
Both films draw on the Book of Exodus as their base text while filling gaps the text itself leaves open, DeMille far more freely, inventing entire romantic subplots absent from Exodus, DreamWorks more conservatively, mostly restricting its invention to interior emotional beats rather than new events. Read side by side, the two adaptations are less a matter of one being truer to the source than of two different eras choosing different aspects of the same ancient story to foreground.