The masterstroke of “The Little Prince,”
Mark Osborne’s reimagining of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 children’s classic,
is its side-by-side use of two styles of animation. Today’s cold, corporate world,
in which gray-faced, hunched-over adults grimly slog through life,
is depicted in severe, rectilinear computer-generated animation.
The magical universe of Saint-Exupéry’s wistful,
poetic novella is rendered in stop-motion animation,
with pastel shades that evoke his original watercolor illustrations.
“The Little Prince” is really a movie within a movie;
the author’s delicate, fanciful story is folded into a harsh,
modernist commentary on depersonalization and conformity in the contemporary workplace.
The main character, the unnamed Little Girl (voiced by Mackenzie Foy),
who is about to turn 9, is relentlessly pushed by her fiercely controlling mother
(Rachel McAdams) to gain admission to a snooty school and spend all her spare time studying.
The poor child is overscheduled within an inch of her life:
A calendar charts her existence down to the millisecond.
A respite from the mental discipline arrives when she meets their next-door neighbor,
the Aviator (Jeff Bridges), after a propeller flies off his backyard airplane
and onto their property.
With his magician’s beard and old-coot drawl, he is a kindly, eccentric,
wise man. Climbing through the hole in the fence separating their houses,
the Little Girl begins a clandestine, through-the-looking-glass friendship with this dreamer,
who tells her of his aeronautical adventures of decades past.
At this point, the stop-motion animation enters the movie.
Mr. Bridges, affecting a grandfatherly voice, gives the film a steady, warm emotional glow.
Even at its most endearing,
the Saint-Exupéry story is far from the kind of smugly reassuring children’s fable manufactured
by Hollywood nowadays. The Aviator entrances the Little Girl with the story of the Little Prince,
a boy from a distant asteroid whom he encountered in the Sahara after his plane crashed.
Among the many interplanetary travels that eventually landed the Little Prince on Earth,
the most emotional involves his fraught romance with a vain, high-strung rose,
which drove him to leave the asteroid.
When the Little Girl meets him, he’s no longer the Little Prince,
but a janitor who has forgotten his childhood.
She leads him on a galactic quest to find the rose he left behind.
For all its magic and imaginative flair,
the story of “The Little Prince” is not especially happy,
although the screenplay, by Irena Brignull and Bob Persichetti,
puts as euphoric a spin as possible on events.
That tale, unlike the modern shell into which it’s been nestled,
is deliberately flighty (if you’ll excuse the pun).
It involves the pain of abandoning childhood dreams, growing up and accepting mortality.
The voice casting and the visual representations
of the characters the boy encounters on his journeys are superb.
The title character, as a boy, is voiced by Riley Osborne (the director’s son) and,
as a young man, by Paul Rudd. Albert Brooks is especially menacing
as the rapacious Businessman who boasts of owning all the stars in the heavens.
Leavening the movie is a jazzy period score by Hans Zimmer and Richard Harvey
through which are woven songs by the French chanteuse Camille and fragments
of vintage French chansons by the singer and songwriter Charles Trenet.
But the film, as if wary of seeming too spaced-out,
devotes more time than necessary to its contemporary frame and not enough to the original story.
That said, the framing delivers an unusually forceful
and imaginative depiction of a child’s-eye vision of the grown-up world:
a fearsome urban jungle peopled by expressionless, robotic beings weighed down by responsibility.
Although the message of the novella
— that “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly;
what is essential is invisible to the eye”
— is reiterated, the film’s caricature of the digital age atmosphere
is so forbidding that it makes the charming fancies of
“The Little Prince” seem quaint and frivolous.
The movie, a Netflix release receiving a theatrical run,
can even be seen as an allegory about filmmaking in today
(by a director of “Kung Fu Panda”),
straddling the line between modern and traditional
styles and blending the best of both.
Inevitably, youth, vigor and technological innovation triumph over nostalgia.
“The Little Prince” is rated PG
(parental guidance suggested) for thematic elements that portray modern life
as a nightmare that cannot be avoided. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.