No offense but I will never get over the attention to detail everyone involved poured into The Prince of Egypt.
One of my favorite things visually about When You Believe is the way it introduces the viewer to all of these incidental characters—nameless fathers and children and old people who have no role in the main action of the story, who appear on screen for a minute at most—and really makes you feel for them.
In one segment there’s a little girl guiding maybe her grandmother up to the main gate out of the city. And here the grandmother pauses, overcome with emotion or fear; she can’t go on.
I never noticed it before, but the inside of the gate is covered in hieroglyphs:
They’re slaves, kneeling with their arms bound behind them. (Next to actual hieroglyphs of slaves at Abu Simbel for comparison.)
There’s an earlier shot of this anonymous old woman gazing over at this wall depicting slaves, the blood and tears of her people sunk into the stone.
She and the child and the rest of the crowd take their first steps as free people past this, and I just.
It’s such a powerful image.