1 ½ out of 5 Bones
Directed by: Mark Osborne
Screenplay by: Irena Brignull and Bob Persichetti
Story by: Mark Osborne and Bob Persichetti
Based on: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Cinematography: Adel Abada Kris Kapp
Release date: 2016
Allow me to explain myself. Yes, the paper stop-motion was extraordinary. Yes, the framing story between Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the little girl actually did touch on some amazing concepts and was surprisingly touching. Yes, people everywhere seem to love it.
A review of this film was one of my initial reasons for creating this blog. I have version after version sitting on my computer. Each ultimately degraded into rants and obscenities and despair, all of it unintelligible. So I’ll make this quick.
The relationship between these two is actually very touching at times
The Little Prince is a book that’s about the absurdity of adults, different forms of love, especially unrequited love and earned loyalty, the importance of hard work but in particular work that is valuable and helpful, not merely self-aggrandizing and selfish. It’s about drawing, and usually not very well, and attempting to communicate with others - and often failing to be completely understood or to understand thanks to your individual worldview. It’s about how knowledge can help you see things clearer, but also take away comfortable ignorance and the feeling of being special. It’s about a little boy from Asteroid B-612 and the rose he loves, but that doesn’t love him back. It was one of the first books I read entirely in French, and it instantly became one of my favourites. I consider it a classic alongside Alice in Wonderland, to which it has structural similarities. Alice also tends to have its overall themes misrepresented in adaptations (its also about the absurdity of adults, in particular English society and convention, as well as the terrors of growing up to be a part of that horrible hilarity. Hence why casting Alice as a full-grown woman doesn’t really work.)
This...film...instead boils all of that down to something I’ve seen in a million films a million times before. Adults = gray, regulated and mind-numbing industry, Children = Fantasy, wonder, imagination, blah blah blah. Is anyone else sick of this? I’ve met some ordinary, tedious children in my time, as well as plenty of dazzlingly creative adults. It’s a stereotype, born from nostalgia, and played out to death, especially in film and particularly in 90’s kids commercials.
Basically it’s a feature film version of this, and just as relevant to the characters depicted.
Now, if this had been made separate from the Little Prince name, as its own thing that created its own characters instead of subverting and misunderstanding the original ones, I think this could have been a very good film. But by calling itself THE LITTLE PRINCE, I intend to judge it as an adaptation of that classic story.
There are so many versions of the Little Prince on film - perhaps the best of which is the 1974 film with Gene Wilder and a claymation short from Will Vinton studios - but none really caught on in the universal public imagination the way, say, Alice did. And the difference is this - Walt Disney did make the definitive adaptation of that. Animation was the perfect way to show that story, and while it’s far from a perfect adaptation, a lot of the tone and characters were spot on. It gave each of them a visual interpretation that are now classic. Characters that weren’t included in that version aren’t typically remembered by the larger public at all. The Little Prince deserved just as much, and yet no one’s managed that definitive adaptation yet. This film convinced me it just might be that one.
Gods, this is heartbreakingly perfect. Everything is just wonderful when the film is in stop-motion. Please, can we remake this film entirely with the same puppets and backgrounds and just make it stuff from the book?
To cut a long story short, and to help you understand me, imagine that you’re a big fan of Alice in Wonderland and there’s never been a truly good movie made from it. Then you see a trailer for a film - and your spirits are lifted! Look, there’s your beloved friends, imagined so beautifully in wonderful traditional animation that suits the original illustrations perfectly. It’s...well, perfect. You might even cry, that’s how much that means to you. Then when you rush to theatre, eagerly hand over your ticket and wait for the film to start you don’t see Alice, or the Mad Hatter, the Gryphon or the Caucus race, not the Mock-Turtle or Tweedle-dee or dum or Carpenter or Walrus or Red Queen or Queen of Hearts, not pastoral England nor topsy-turvy Wonderland. No, you see some strange, boringly-designed kid sitting in a dull computer animated room reading the book Alice in Wonderland. There are brief cutaways to that book, done in stunningly original animation, and for those brief minutes-long segments you can pretend you are watching the movie you came to see, with Alice and the Knight and the Dormouse and the March Hare and the curiouser-and-curiouser tone that you love - before being jerked back into an altogether uglier and less enjoyable film where that snippet is related to the life of the boring little girl reading the book. The tension of Alice in Wonderland is stripped away while you watch a seperate film. I felt like crying out for the remote so I could flip back to the channel I was watching. If this Princess-Bride-like framing device was an attempt to fill out the running time, it clearly went overboard - the stop-motion book adaptation bits made up maybe 15 minutes of the running time, and were often abridged, not expanded. Perhaps a version like this would also be more acceptable if a version of this story was already well-known and classically adapted, like Disney’s Alice. As is, this is a terrible way to be introduced to the Prince.
The inclusion of an older Antoine was a great idea. In fact it makes more sense for him to tell the story than the grandfather in Princess Bride. He’s well done here, if sometimes a little too quirky. I think he should have been the main character in the film, as he is the book. But all kids films need to have kid leads, apparently.
Then, as the film goes on, it surprises you - there’s a moment where an element of the book is tied in quite nicely to a plot point of the the computer movie - that death can happen, and happen to good people, and indeed, happen to children, loved ones and parental figures. The little girl character has a reaction I recognized in myself from my early reading days - I still recall throwing Firewing by Kenneth Oppel against the bathroom door and openly wailing for hours. It seems like the film may redeem itself by reflecting on how we use fiction as a way to understand the world around us, and how books and media are often how children come to understand grand concepts like death and love and loss. I was genuinely moved. What a way, I thought, to end this film. It’s quiet and simple, and yet there’s something honest about it. I can’t respect this as an adaptation of the book, but I can accept it as an homage and its own, very different product.
Then comes the knock at the door, and the surprise third act barges through it with an ugly smile on its face.
“Oh?” it says, spitting bits of wood into your gaping face. “You thought we’d keep that book in a separate reality and style and represent the characters faithfully there, and tell our own story around it while keeping the sanctity of the original story intact?” Perhaps here the metaphor uses an orphan's leg bone as a toothpick. “Well, I regret to inform you that’s not so. For you see, the little girl is going to barge into that story just like I just did to you now, with similar disrespect.”
To switch metaphors, imagine this film was instead The Princess Bride. Not only is the film not about Wesley and Buttercup, but instead about Fred Savage with brief, sped-up clips of Princess Bride spotted throughout his amazing adventure of being sick in bed, but in the third act Fred leaps into the book, gives Wesley a pep-talk so he can save Buttercup, helps Inigo fence Count Rugen and finally makes himself captain of the Revenge and marries Buttercup after convincing Wesley he’d be better off as a lonely farmboy forever. That’s basically what happens here.
Honestly if this framing device had been more like Princess Bride and stayed entirely separate from the book, with the focus still on the book, I would have loved this film. It occurs to me that filming these parts in live-action may have worked better to emphasis the difference in tone as well. It would also help since the CG never looks as good as the stop-motion.
Spoilers Ahead.
Yes, the little girl goes on an adventure to stop the Little Prince from dying (as he does in the book), while simultaneously trying to save the old man she’s become friends with who is dying in the ‘real’ world. She finds that the Prince is now a menial part of a dull world and that she must rescue him by convincing him that he’s special. She does. The old man magically recovers and the Prince comes back to life and so does his Rose, who now loves him. The girl doesn’t have join the dull boxy world of adults but can bring imagination and life to their world instead.
Spoilers End.
He’s so cute, I love it, but get your OC off of him! Dammit, there had to be a way to use these elements to make a good film. But this certainly wasn’t it.
I was never one for fanfiction, but I’ve read some here and there. Enough to know when I’m reading or watching that particular genre. And this does a disservice to that genre. Good fanfiction can replicate the tone of the original work, or reimagine it in such completely new fashion that it’s interesting and fresh. Here, we have something that’s trying to write their self-insert OC into the original work, and eventually that OC gets to save everyone and become the new focal point of the story. Also known as the worst kind of fanfiction.
The third act of this film not only does that, but attempts to undo the poignant and dark end of the story. I haven’t even mentioned the parts it leaves out or censors in favour of making room for the innocuous tone it wants. I understand that adaptation needs to make changes - but I firmly believe those changes should help convey the original ideas in the new medium, and should fit the narrative overall. The original tackled themes like alcoholism, nihilism, hope, desire for validation, despair, suicide, loneliness, solipsism, and how love can make something special to an individual. This film wants to boil that down to ‘kids are born wonderful but lose that as they age’.
Please, read the book, or watch the Gene Wilder film. Or wait for me to direct a future adaptation of this one. If there’s one thing this film managed to inspire in me, it’s the desire to see this book adapted properly, even if I have to do it myself.
Confession time. The movie trailer for this made me cry when I first saw it. Seeing something I imagined and loved brought so perfectly to screen can have that power. It was the movie I looked forward to the most this year. Upon seeing the film, I cried again - but this time out of rage. I rarely cry out of rage. It’s an awful, awful feeling and one that was only possible because I already loved the film I thought this was going to be. You can call that bias, but I’ve been similarly psyched for another stop-motion adaptation of a book that was important to me as a child: LAIKA’s Coraline. And that’s my favourite animated film of all time.
Oh, and for others wanting to see the extensive history of animated Prince adaptations:
Will Vinton
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