Prince of Egypt.

Prince of Egypt is just as much an animation remake of Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 The Ten Commandments as it is a retelling of the biblical story.

I was prepared to hate this movie. No, I wanted to hate it, because a cartoon version of such a stern, monumental, founding event struck me as not just a bad idea but a cultural affront. So I was storing up venomous remarks even before I entered the theater.

Alas, I'm unable to use them. To be sure, the film is sometimes egregious. The boy Moses and his adoptive brother, Rameses, hot rod in their chariots as if they were auditioning for a Roger Corman biker movie (The Wild Pharaohs?). Zipporah is turned into a swashbuckling tomboy along the lines of Esmeralda in Disney's Hunchback, as if biblical women were not already strong enough to please feminists. And the Stephen Schwartz score is, by and large, dreadful.

Yet the film moved me. The animators and scriptwriters have not turned the story into a relativistic, multicultural, chicken-soup-for-the-soul smarmy mess. No, they have used the plot device lifted from DeMille - the early brotherhood of Rameses and Moses turning into epic enmity - to present a concept to children that is by now almost alien to our culture, though it is one of the central themes of the Bible: the persistence of an evil so deep that it visits itself upon the young and innocent. Moses, at first as proud to be a prince of Egypt as his brother, breaks with his past when he learns of the slaughter of the innocents from which he was saved. But Rameses, the upholder of tradition, sinks into the culture of death that has spawned him. By being a dutiful heir, he dooms his own heir.

This is epitomized in one shot. Moses has gone to petition Pharaoh in a temple where the ruler is accompanied by his little son. Moses stands on one side of a wall painting which depicts the drowning of the Hebrew babies while Pharaoh stands opposite him. Between the two men and below the painting stands the firstborn Egyptian prince. The pictures of the falling, drowning babies seem to tumble onto the head of the real child, seem to make him the inheritor of their destruction. It is an image of doom unmatched in any other children's movie.

Again and again, the animators and writers refuse to pull punches, refuse to make the biblical story saccharine. The fire of the burning bush leaps forth in fury when Moses pleads his ineptitude as a messenger of God. The divine voice thunders, "Who hath made man's mouth?...have not I, the Lord?" For a moment, God is scary. Is this the first time in a children's movie that God has been made scary? And is the Passover scene - eerily presenting a mist that follows Egyptian children into their houses to kill them - the first expressly meant to show children that the ways of God can be not only mysterious but downright stomach-churning?

The people at Dreamworks have done the right thing, though they may be punished at the box office. The Bible must not be rendered innocuous, even when it's adapted for kids. Especially not then.