The Little Prince (2015)
Directed by Mark Osborne
Based on the best-seller book 'The Little Prince', the movie tells the story of a little girl that lives with resignation in a world where efficiency and work are the only dogmas. Everything will change when accidentally she discovers her neighbor that will tell her about the story of the Little Prince that he once met.
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What critics say influenced The Little Prince
But Saint-Exupéry’s story is both overextended and crowded out by the final third here, where the girl actually flies the aviator’s old plane into a gloomily all-adult planet of drone-workers (it’s reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil), rescuing the little prince from grown-up drudgery and recalling him to his former child-self and his beloved rose, awaiting him on Asteroid B-612.
The ideas in the main story sometime play out as satire, cut from the same cloth as Brazil (dir.
The aesthetics of the dreary, starless world outside of the prince's fantasy universe seem inspired primarily by the relentlessly gray, boxed-in world of Jacques Tati’s masterpiece of French cinema, Playtime, itself a hymn to the human spirit of ingenuity and individuality in a drab grown-up life.
For the new film, Osborne (“Kung Fu Panda”) and screenwriters Irena Brignull (“The Boxtrolls”) and Bob Persichetti have taken the generally more effective tack of nesting Saint-Exupery’s story within an elaborate framing device set in the kind of modular modern metropolis prophesied by Jacques Tati’s “Playtime,” full of technology and free of wonder.
Visually, the first act of the film, with its square trees to match its square houses, reminded me of the suburban rigidity of the first act of Brad Bird ’s “ The Incredibles ,” while visions of the world of the title character reminded me of LAIKA gems like “ Coraline ” and “Paranorman.”
These scenes are a joy to behold — a bliss-out of brightly colored paper and hand-molded clay that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the texturally varied and vibrant stop-motion work seen in Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and Henry Selick’s “Coraline.”
So immense is the artistry that went into these sequences, which include a blend of stop-motion and computer graphics in a stylized approach similar to releases from Laika Studios such as “Coraline” and “The Boxtrolls,” that they could have worked as wordless pieces of the narrative.
Visually, the first act of the film, with its square trees to match its square houses, reminded me of the suburban rigidity of the first act of Brad Bird ’s “ The Incredibles ,” while visions of the world of the title character reminded me of LAIKA gems like “ Coraline ” and “Paranorman.”
In the real world, it is most readily evocative of a European-tinted The Incredibles, with characters with bubble eyes and proportionate bodies, but also a firmly realistic understanding of the world.
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As he does, “The Little Prince” makes a remarkable stylistic leap from the accomplished but familiar CG environs of these opening scenes (big-eyed, bobble-headed humans; modernist-futurist design influences) into 2D stop-motion animation, bringing the world of Saint-Exupery’s original story to life in beautiful handcrafted images based on the author’s own crudely elegant watercolors (seen in the book’s first printing and all subsequent editions).
En ese sentido, esta película evoca otros ejercicios animados como The Wall (Parker, 1982), aquella pieza basada en la música de Pink Floyd y que también, muy a su modo, gritaba rebeldía en un mensaje que bien podrían compartir ambas cintas: We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thoughts control….
While there are many genre-specific tropes used to make the story appeal to younger viewers, there is also something about the patience Osborne has for a scene to play out that immediately recalls Brad Bird’s “The Iron Giant” and, to a lesser extent, Gore Verbinski’s “Rango.”
Not unlike Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Little Girl falls down the “rabbit hole,” that of The Aviator’s world of a previous century.
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We are reminded of films such as The Wizard of Oz and even The English Patient, but mostly the audience is invited to celebrate the purified wonder of youth and the dazzle of life’s invisible indispensables.
Seventy years later, the book’s influence can be seen in everything from “The English Patient” to “The Lego Movie.”
The main story’s CG-animation aptly gives these humans in their roads-gridded, boxed-up-and-cubicled, super-structured, all-business world a dull, plastic look (it’s a cutting satire of modern-non-life, as if dryly merging Tati’s Play Time and Roy Andersson’s Songs From The Second Floor).