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1998 animated film score battle: Mulan vs Prince of Egypt


WampaRat

1998 animated film score battle: Mulan vs Prince of Egypt  

36 members have voted

  1. 1. Which animated score do you prefer overall?

  2. 2. Which do you feel has the better songs?

  3. 3. Best overall animated film?



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I can hazard a guess as to which way the poll will lean in this forum. But which stellar score to the following 1998 animated films do you prefer?

 

Jerry Goldsmith’s Mulan?

Hans Zimmer’s The Prince of Egypt?

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As much as I like Goldsmith and Mulan, but Prince of Egypt is a masterpiece. One of the best Zimmer scores ever. And the songs are amazing as well, my favorite being Through Heaven's Eyes. Anyway I watched both of these movies countless times on VHS/DVD when I was a kid.

 

Maybe the poll should include Powell and HGW's Antz and Randy Newman's A Bug's Life? They're all from 98 as well.

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The songs do not strengthen Mulan. Without the songs, Prince of Egypt flounders. Mulan for score, Egypt for songs. The Prince of Egypt is the only time Stephen Schwartz has been in charge of lyrics and music and not made a giant mess of things.

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 I’m sad Dreamworks never kept trying to push the envelope with their traditional 2-D animated work. The kernel of the idea for PoE came from Spielberg who pitched the idea of “why couldn’t we tell a story as potent as Schindler’s list in animated form?” But American audiences at the time seemed to only see animation as kiddie/Disney formula affair. And then Shrek happened not too long after. So everything was pop songs and fart jokes for DW after that. 
 

You can see them trying to do something a little different with 2002s Spirit (heaven forbid an animated horse doesn’t talk in the movie lol) and Road to El Dorado is a blast. But marketing to kiddos and not really delivering on that promise of a Disney-esque experience probably hurt them. Such a hit/miss animation studio :(

 

But I if they rolled out something like Prince of Egypt today I would totally be on board.

 

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What makes Prince of Egypt so compelling is that it is born out of the Disney musical framework but the subject matter is much deeper. That's its edgiest concept. It was very affecting to a Disney musical fan in 1998. That still impresses me.

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18 minutes ago, WampaRat said:

 I’m sad Dreamworks never kept trying to push the envelope with their traditional 2-D animated work. The kernel of the idea for PoE came from Spielberg who pitched the idea of “why couldn’t we tell a story as potent as Schindler’s list in animated form?” 

 

I think it came from Katzenberg who was trying to do it back when he was at Disney.

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Good to know!

 

BTW - anyone listen to the staged musics version of Prince of Egypt? I saw it performed live at the Tuacahn amphitheater in St. George Utah. Staging and acting was great. But the music doesn’t incorporate any Zimmer’s score sadly. And the new songs felt..mmm…odd(?) I wanted it to feel like the musical version of Hunchback they created. Now THERE’s a perfect complement to the original animated film. But the PoE musical I didn’t think held a candle to the animated movie.

(sorry to derail my own thread).

 

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The German Hunchback, Der Glockner, is a masterpiece.

 

The American cast of Hunchback... not so much. The London Prince of Egypt cast is also rather terrible. In both cases, there were too many new songs of a lower caliber. Couldn't agree more about Egypt. I mean, take a listen to what they did to The Plagues. If that's your cup of tea, drink up. Be my guest but blegh.

 

With Hunchback it was especially disappointing because the original English lyrics of the Der Glockner von Notre Dame production were actually incredible and very much on par with the original songs. When I heard it was finally getting produced in English, I was ecstatic. Alas, we decided to change it yet again and we have the Hunchback equivalent of the 2017 Beauty and the Beast. An almost identical situation with a brilliant original score & song combo, a cast album that is deserving to stand beside it, and then...

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If the world was fair, Zimmer would've won his Oscar not in 94 with Lion King, but in 98 for either Prince of Egypt or The Thin Red Line. Meanwhile, the 94 Oscar would've gone to Thomas Newman for Shawshank Redemption. 

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1 hour ago, Edmilson said:

If the world was fair, Zimmer would've won his Oscar not in 94 with Lion King, but in 98 for either Prince of Egypt or The Thin Red Line. Meanwhile, the 94 Oscar would've gone to Thomas Newman for Shawshank Redemption. 

I fully second this^^^

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I had forgotten how good the songs (and the score) to PoE are.

 

The songs to Mulan aren't great. Except maybe I'll Make a Man Out of You. But WOW what a score. It always surprises me when I realize that Mulan is one of my favorite Goldsmith scores. Period.

 

And then I remember the Burning Bush. Yeah, there's a whole tennis match in my head right now between these scores.

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I do wonder, for the people who have fond/positive feelings towards either of these movies or scores, whether you stumbled upon them in your formative years?  Was 13-14 when these came out so I don’t have any particular nostalgia, and watching and listening to them now as an adult they are kinda just fine. 

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I was nine. Saw them both in theatres. Owned the VHS. Had siblings. Watched them many many times over. I wouldn't call either one a masterpiece but I find Prince of Egypt to be on par with other strong 4-star Disney Renaissance pictures from the same period, of which Mulan is probably one. It's been a while. I'm not a live-in babysitter anymore but I still remember Mulan fondly. The score is absolutely incredible. I sincerely hope it gets a Special Collection or Legacy Collection soon.

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The results of this poll closely match my feelings on these films. I first saw both of them when I was about 7 and I grew up watching them. Mulan has the better score. The Prince of Egypt has better songs (and it's not even close). I enjoy both films, but consider The Prince of Egypt the more powerful of the two.

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19 hours ago, mstrox said:

I do wonder, for the people who have fond/positive feelings towards either of these movies or scores, whether you stumbled upon them in your formative years?  Was 13-14 when these came out so I don’t have any particular nostalgia, and watching and listening to them now as an adult they are kinda just fine. 

 

I was 20/21, so no. Formative years over. But I like both scores and films as they are. My classic karaoke number has been "Let's Get Down to Business" for at least a decade now.

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6 minutes ago, Thor said:

My classic karaoke number has been "Let's Get Down to Business" for at least a decade now.

 

 

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14 minutes ago, Thor said:

 

I was 20/21, so no. Formative years over. But I like both scores and films as they are. My classic karaoke number has been "Let's Get Down to Business" for at least a decade now.

 

I'll Make a Man Out of You?

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2 hours ago, blondheim said:

 

I'll Make a Man Out of You?


Yeah. It has basically become “Let’s Get Down To Business” in my circles at this point.

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I don’t even call the song by its name anymore. In my karaoke days, people only said “Sing Mulan” and everyone knew what we were talking about. Probably belted it out 100 times! 

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Songs is pretty easy, where The Prince of Egypt wins hands down, and they even work with the fairly obviously Zimmer-esque arrangements. Mulan is one of those annoying halfway houses where Disney didn't seem ready to commit to having no songs (and the film didn't really need them, even though I do enjoy them) but they reduce them to a footnote of 4 songs that account for 11 minutes of the film (compared to, say Beauty and the Beast where about a third of the running time is sung - Prince of Egypt is only slightly less than that). I quite enjoyed the Prince of Egypt stage show cast recording and wouldn't mind seeing the show itself sometime. I think it was, sadly, a victim of C-19.

 

Score is a much closer call as I love both equally. I find Zimmer's must much more affecting than many of the historical epics from the 50s and 60s - Bernstein's Ten Commandments is, obviously a classic, but it doesn't have the emotional impact of his smaller scores, yet Zimmer (despite his predilection for bombast) contributes some surprisingly moving music to Prince of Egypt, notably The Burning Bush which is one of my favourite Zimmer cues. Having said that, Mulan is Goldsmith on top form, with some equally moving cues (The Burned Out Village in particular) as well as some of his finest action writing of the period. I went to Mulan but it's pretty well a tie.

 

Film wise, I've seen both a few times but couldn't really pick between them, but for sheer spectacle and the animation envelopes that it pushed (notably the Red Sea sequence which is still dazzling even though today you could probably knock that up on a standard PC/Mac - although I seem to recall it had whales in it... who know?!), Prince of Egypt just pips it.

 

I would absolutely buy both in official expanded editions in a heartbeat. Mulan gets more attention, expansion wise, because the original album gives the score such short shrift (although the Academy promo isn't hard to track down) but there are some nice moments missing from Prince of Egypt, although the addition of the Chariot and Epilogue from the Target (I think) exclusive round things out nicely (even if they are featured as a single cue - one of the very few occasions I've done some audio editing as there's simply no effective way to introduce them meaningfully into the rest of the album sequence).

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