Little Fugitive (1953)
Directed by Morris Engel
After a prank makes Joey Norton believe he killed his older brother, he runs away from home and spends the day at Coney Island while his brother tries to find him before their mother gets home.
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What critics compared Little Fugitive to
The Florida Project draws on the legacy of films such as Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1978), which offers a child’s-eye view of Watts, and Little Fugitive (Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, 1953), which does the same for Coney Island.
But what it really reminded me of was “Little Fugitive,” the great 1953 independent movie, about a boy let loose in Brooklyn’s Coney Island, that influenced the French New Wave, or François Truffaut’s “Small Change,” in which childhood is comprehended, without sticky sentimentality, as an enraptured time of life.
The Florida Project’s more whimsical childhood setting is reminiscent of the “Little Rascals” of Our Gang , or the seminal work of early-’50s naturalism Little Fugitive , which followed a working-class runaway navigating the chaos of Coney Island.
Working within a formula established by the 1953 masterpiece “Little Fugitive,” in which a young child roams Coney Island on his own, Baker uses his measured neorealist style to turns the grimy setting into a sun-soaked wonderland in which the children relate to their surroundings as an ongoing game.