The Lit­tle Prince

Mark Osborne is best known for co-direct­ing the mar­tial arts-prac­tic­ing ani­mat­ed fam­i­ly com­e­dy, Kung Fu Pan­da, which explores the theme of a fam­i­ly grow­ing up in much the same way as his lat­est, The Lit­tle Prince. Adapt­ed from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s trea­sured nov­el, ​‘Le Petit Prince’, which has been trans­lat­ed into 253 lan­guages, this children’s clas­sic was inspired by a real-life inci­dent in which the author was left strand­ed after crash land­ing in the Sahara desert dur­ing a record attempt to fly from Paris to Saigon in 1935.

Saint-Exupréy expe­ri­enced vivid hal­lu­ci­na­tions brought on by dehy­dra­tion before a nomad on camel­back saved his life. The film’s plot and visu­al style rep­re­sents these delu­sions, with a unique mix of var­i­ous ani­ma­tion tech­niques from com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed images and clay­ma­tion used through­out. The sto­ry fol­lows The Lit­tle Girl (Macken­zie Foy), who lives an adult lifestyle due to her mother’s desire for her daugh­ter to attend an esteemed pri­vate school. After relo­cat­ing, her new neigh­bour The Avi­a­tor (Jeff Bridges) shows The Lit­tle Girl a dif­fer­ent way to view life, where the unimag­in­able is pos­si­ble. It’s here she dis­cov­ers the world of The Lit­tle Prince.

As the orig­i­nal sto­ry is bare­ly enough for a fea­ture-length film, Osborne intro­duces a meta nar­ra­tive, allow­ing ​‘Le Petit Prince’ to be told visu­al­ly with­in the film while retain­ing its integri­ty as a short children’s nov­el. It’s clear that Osborne want­ed to tack­le this adap­ta­tion with the utmost respect for the source mate­r­i­al, his love of this won­drous tale evi­dent through­out. The dia­logue runs quick and the cuts even quick­er to con­jure a fast-paced tone which com­mu­ni­cates the effi­cien­cy of The Lit­tle Girl’s life. When she first receives the sto­ry of ​‘The Lit­tle Prince’ the CGI ani­ma­tion gives way to clay­ma­tion, this trad­ing of tech­niques induc­ing an enchant­i­ng trans­for­ma­tion with­in the sto­ry and the viewer.

The Lit­tle Prince is now avail­able to watch on Netflix.