The Little Prince

I usually take more to the ends of films than the beginning.  So it's taking a bit to process how to talk about this one: an utterly striking start that really carries through the rest of the piece.



The opening scene for the school interview isn't too intense, certainly I’ve seen some fairly stark interview waiting scenes before.  But then we move to the swankiest part of town, wherein all the houses are stacked rectangles.  And then the mom has planned out the little girl's entire life until she's out of college down to the hour.  Including all her birthday presents.  Like the one for her 9th birthday in two seeks.

The Little Girl is 8 years old and they're telling her to decide her entire life path.  Jesus fuck, no wonder she needs a damn fantasy adventure!

From what I know of course this entire plot is not taken from the story it's adapted from.  Instead, it's a framing device around the story of the actual Little Prince, which is actually pretty well handled.  The mix of CG and what seems to be stop motion (and a really good approximation if not) sets everything off nicely, positing the Narrator as the Aviator is pretty nice.  They really did quite a great job of paralleling the new material to the original, and I think grounding this part of the movie in mundane things really sells the core emotional hook of two very lonely people finding one another.

Now, once the Little Prince finishes, the movie has another act to go through, and it loses a lot.  Switching back to the main art style entirely is definitely a bit off as a decision.  A lot of the main animation can be a bit empty, too clean, and that works wonderfully during while it’s alternating with Little Prince’s story because it highlights how sterile and lacking in humanity the Little Girl’s world is.  Without that contrast though it just starts to feel like a budget limitation.  And it probably was!  This is a French production, they don’t have the talent pool and money big American houses do, so I don’t doubt they struggled to keep the main animation budget under control, and the Little Prince animation was undoubtedly a lot more costly and had to be utilized as sparingly as possible to get the movie out the door.  But when you’ve done so wonderfully for 2/3rds of your running time hiding all those facts with good creative decisions and using those limitations to create narrative resonance, suddenly losing it can be quite distracting.

But y’know what?  There’s something about the compare/contrast between the original material and the book and the time periods they were made in that kinda works.  The original was written during World War II, and very much has the feel of a fairy tale for the industrial, scientific world.  It’s morally forthright and ends at a place meant to allow parents to explain to their children about death and the afterlife and so forth.  It’s written in the perspective of an adult, so they can teach their children.  The new material is from the perspective of the Little Girl, in our time.  Like most children now, she’s been orphaned by modern life: one parent gone, the other overworked and absent to make up the gap.  Her life is far lonelier than the lives of a mid-20th century children.  Until the start of the movie, she really had only herself to understand the world through, and so when confronted with the reality of mortality?  The only one that could help her cope with it was herself.  Through the lens of the story, she imagined a new ending, one she could digest, because it added the context the original story could assume a parent would.  And in that light, the Little Prince returning home and finding his loved one died, rather than simply leaving the earth through death himself, is much more suitable.  It doesn’t assume you have some independent understanding of Heaven, and instead creates a literal image of loved ones lighting the way for you after they’re gone.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, the bits with Mr. Prince are still goofy as hell, but as a vessel to get to that ending to the journey… I’ll live.

There’s one earlier scene I do want to mention apart from all that though, because it mislead me a bit about the overall moral here.  Like obviously a play on mortality and the journey to adulthood are what The Little Prince is about (unless it’s… waaaay different in its totality than what’s in this film).  But the start of the book content, with the Narrator’s story about his failures to draw and then his drawing of a box being just what the Little Prince needed?  That’s an interesting facet of that that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.  The Narrator had a fierce desire to express himself through art, but didn’t have much talent for it.  So when he draws something he can handle, then explains that what was needed was hidden inside it?  I kinda figured it’d be a lesson along the lines of “find a way to make what you can do fit in with what you love to do”.  But then, I suppose that is the sort of lesson a modern person would want to take from a work, isn’t it?

Rating: 8/10.  Never quite got the emotional punch to rate higher, but there’s a lot here that’s working and I think everyone should give it a shot.