Epics and Insects

And the characters move in a whole new world. To capture the bugs' environment, says Jobs, ''we used a device called a Bug Cam to examine real bugs. We quickly realized that from a bug's perspective looking up, with the sun shining down through a canopy of grass and clovers, the world is a far more luminous place than we'd imagined.''

But no matter how convincing those bugs are, they probably won't cannibalize the audience for The Prince of Egypt, a decidedly more adult-oriented film. ''We want to use animation to do more than just tell fairy tales and coming-of-age stories,'' says Finkelman Cox. ''They've been done over and over. Our slate is going to have edgier films that aren't exactly out-of-bounds for children, but that are really made for more sophisticated audiences.''

The Prince, in fact, well deserves its PG rating. In lieu of singing camels and dancing asps, there are chilling scenes involving the Angel of Death, the drowning of Pharaoh's army, and an attack of 7 million locusts. Even characters that might be expected to deliver comic relief — notably the court magicians voiced by Steve Martin and Martin Short — wind up playing it straight (other voices include Ralph Fiennes as the Pharaoh Rameses and Val Kilmer as Moses, along with Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren, and Danny Glover). ''We stopped looking at this as an animated movie two years ago,'' says Simon Wells, who directed The Prince along with Brenda Chapman and Steve Hickner. ''It's a film that happens to be drawn, and it does get serious at times.''

Nobody is taking the movie more seriously than Katzenberg. ''In our initial meeting,'' Wells recalls, ''Jeffrey was clutching this book of sketches by the 19th-century illustrator Gustave Dore. He said he wanted the movie to have Dore's symmetry and lighting, Claude Monet's painting style and color, and David Lean's epic cinematography, like in Lawrence of Arabia. We almost fell on the floor.''

Given the subject matter and sometimes serious nature of The Prince, conventional product tie-ins were out of the question. (What were they gonna market? McMatzo?) Instead, DreamWorks is making the most of the music. ''When You Believe,'' the movie's designated hit, has been recorded as a duet between Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. Besides the soundtrack, DreamWorks is releasing star-studded gospel and country albums with songs ''inspired'' by the film.

But the promo item DreamWorks covets most is a Best Picture Oscar nomination, and the studio has worked hard for it during the last four years. The Prince's most complex scene, the four-minute parting of the Red Sea, took 12 digital-effects artists and 10 craftsmen, who spent 318,000 hours rendering the effect. The studio also invited more than 500 scholars and religious leaders to serve as consultants on The Prince.

In the end, though, the makers of both films want their tinkering and politicking to serve a higher purpose. ''The hope is that people won't 'notice' any of the technology but will just sit back and enjoy the story,'' Wells says of The Prince. And as Lasseter says of A Bug's Life, ''We just wanted to make a movie that my kids' kids could enjoy 60, 70, even 100 years from now.''