The Movie: This, I believe, was the first major animated picture made by Dreamworks, and what a grand undertaking it was. In case you didn't know, Prince of Egypt is based on the biblical story of Moses and the exodus, and I gotta say, it was better than I was expecting.

Having heard Bible stories all those years I was growing up, I figured I'd be either completely bored, or just appalled at the presentation I was about to see, but in actuality, Prince of Egypt ended up being a rather exciting and interesting rendition of this millennia-old story.

The list of voices is a veritable who's who of Hollywood, featuring Val Kilmer as the voice of Moses (and also the voice of God), as well as the voices of Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Danny Glover, Patrick Stewart (woohoo!), Steve Martin, Martin Short, and according to IMDB, Mel Brooks and Natalie Portman provided some uncredited voice work as well.

The animation is rather breathtaking, with beautiful backgrounds, and great special effects, including the coolest vision of what the burning bush looked like I've ever seen. Other notable sections were the hieroglyph dream sequence, the plagues sequence, and of course, the spectacular parting of the red sea that really made my heart stop, it was that good.

Those are all the good. The bad? Well, most of the songs were just OK, but there were one or two songs in this movie had lyrics that I thought were so cheesy I couldn't believe anyone would actually think they were good enough to put into such an epic picture.

But really, overall, this is a pretty good version of the exodus story, and some incredibly spectacular animation.

The DVD: The video transfer on this disc is brilliant, with beautiful detail and vibrant color, and excellent blackpoint -- much of this movie takes place in the dark, and none of the detail is lost in those dark areas. The 5.1 audio is crisp and clear with a surround mix that subtly envelops you. There is also a separate DTS version available, but I didn't get that one.

Special features are plentiful, starting with Directors' commentary, and a making-of featurette. There's also a little bit on how they made this movie in 50 languages and wanted the same quality of sound on all of them, and to show how much work they put into that, there is a short musical segment where the piece seamlessly switches from one language to another... quite amazing, actually. There is also a short on the animation of the chariot race scene.

There's also a slideshow presentation with music of the art of The Prince of Egypt, two theatrical trailers (both letterboxed non-anamorphic widescreen), a sneak-preview trailer for both The Road to El Dorado and Chicken Run. You'll also find cast and crew bios, and production notes (both text).

Then there's the rather strange piece on Technical Effects -- it's the only one of all the extras encoded in an anamorphic format, yet it was clearly shot and edited for 4:3 standard viewing, with black bars on the sides of the 16:9 image. This is strange because the other features thus far have been in a standard 4:3 format and encoded as such, and while, doing it this way suits people with widescreen TV's just fine, it must kinda suck for folks with regular TV's, and it's not like the whole lot of features were done that way.

All in all, it's a great movie, and a great DVD loaded with great features. It's great.