Archive Episode - The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner & Simon Wells, 1998) (with Francesca Stavrakopoulou)

The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner & Simon Wells, 1998).

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

To celebrate the summer, Chris and Alex take another trawl through the Fantasy/Animation archive to pick out some of their favourite past instalments of the podcast. For this first archive episode for 2026, they turn to their discussion of The Prince of Egypt (Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner & Simon Wells, 1998) that took place way back in March 2021 that featured the insights of biblical scholar and broadcaster Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter. Listen again at their analysis of this 1998 cel-animated and CG epic that took in conversations about musicality, animated adaptations, star voices, spectacle, and myth-making, as well as the film’s contribution to the industrial standing of DreamWorks as a successful Hollywood studio, the politics of white-washing and colour-coding, and the stylistic mobilisation of Christian iconography.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Suggested Readings

• Honess Roe, Annabelle. 2013. Animated Documentary. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Fletcher, Angus. 1964. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

• Sleight, Graham. “Fantasies of History and Religion.” In The Cambridge Guide to Fantasy Literature, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, 248-256. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. 2004. King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

• Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. 2010. Land of our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims. New York: T&T Clark.

• Stavrakopoulou, Francesca. 2012. Reading the Hebrew Bible. London: Routledge.

• Summers, Sam. 2020. DreamWorks Animation: Intertextuality and Aesthetics in Shrek and Beyond. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

• Wells, Paul. 1998. Understanding Animation. London: Routledge.