A big part of what makes "The Prince of Egypt" such a special film is how seriously it treats its subject matter. Just like "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" remains one of the darkest and most mature Disney movies ever made, "The Prince of Egypt" similarly remains one of the best things DreamWorks has done and certainly the studio's most ambitious film. Katzenberg reportedly sought to make an animated adaptation of "The Ten Commandments" at Disney but was repeatedly turned down by then-CEO Michael Eisner due to the story's religious aspect. However, at DreamWorks and with Steven "I made the definitive Holocaust film" Spielberg on his side, Katzenberg could make an animated biblical epic in the style of the grand live-action productions of the 1950s. "Steven had the idea, and David [Geffen] was the one who said, 'If you do it, you can't tell a fairy tale. You're going to have to go about telling this with a sense of respect and integrity that nobody's done in modern times.' That was instinctual brilliance,'" Katzenberg once told the LA Times. In order to bring the epic story to life, Katzenberg reached out to both former Walt Disney Feature Animation and Amblimation artists, ultimately assembling a crew of 350 people for the film. All that artistry is on display in every frame of the movie. "The Prince of Egypt" is a true epic, a film that captures the grandness of Ancient Egypt and one of the few legitimately great movies about the subject. Towering temples and monuments fill the background of almost every shot, reminding both the film's characters and the audience of this civilization's achievements without hiding the many, many enslaved people whose labor made those achievements possible. The result is not just a stunning visual accomplishment but also a phenomenal blend of traditional hand-drawn and computer animation, with the parting of the seas sequence looking better than most big-budget movies today. The story maintains a dramatic and serious tone throughout the film's runtime as well, forgoing comedic relief and gags even when addressing the topic of infanticide. As a whole "The Prince of Egypt" felt like both the continuation of and the next step in the trend Disney had embarked upon in the mid-'90s with "Pocahontas" and the aforementioned "Hunchback of Notre Dame." It was, in other words, a movie meant to usher a new era of animation ... except it didn't.