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DreamWorks Animation

Joseph: King of Dreams

The Genesis account of Joseph — the coat, the pit, Potiphar's house, the prison, the famine and the reunion — made as a direct-to-video companion to The Prince of Egypt. Joseph's dreams are rendered as a swirling Van Gogh-styled sequence that sets them visibly apart from the waking story.

ProvisionalFilm & seriesInterdenominational
Where to watch

Why this is listed

It is the only animated Joseph made at a real production standard, and it keeps the hard part: the brothers do a wicked thing and Joseph forgives them anyway, without the film explaining the wickedness away. Weaker than The Prince of Egypt and openly so, but the two together cover most of Genesis and Exodus for a nine-year-old.

Before you press play

Invents Joseph's childhood as the indulged late son of Rachel, which sharpens the brothers' resentment beyond what Genesis states, and it gives him a dream-vision in the pit that is not in the text. Potiphar is shown deciding to spare Joseph's life, which Genesis implies but never says. The beating, the pit and the sale are the frightening part for a younger child, along with a stylised famine sequence. Genesis 38 — Judah and Tamar — is absent entirely, as it is in nearly every adaptation of this story.

Suited to Older children. Age judgements are ours, not a rating board’s — you know your own family.

How to start

  1. Open universalpicturesathome.com (opens an external site) and read what DreamWorks Animation says about itself before you read anything else.
  2. Read the note above first. It is there so an evening does not go wrong twenty minutes in.
  3. Watch it yourself before you watch it with children, if there are children.
  4. Read the passage it dramatises alongside it. The point is to send you back to the text, not to replace it.
  5. Afterwards, ask what the story added and what it left out. That conversation is worth more than the film.

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