From Cannes: "The Little Prince" a Little Disappointment

Adapting a well-known novel is often a tough job, because the director has to face the choice between staying loyal to the original work and taking creative license. In the case of “The Little Prince,” director Mark Osborne completely restructures the household French fantasy by simplifying its themes and adding a completely original story. The result, however, is ambivalent at best.

The fundamental change that Osborne makes in adapting Saint-Exupéry’s novel is centering the story not around the Little Prince and the pilot who meets him in the ’40s, but a girl (voiced by Clara Poincaré in French, Mackenzie Foy in English) who lives in the 21st century and will attend a prominent middle school after her summer break. While studiously preparing for school under the discipline of her mother (Florence Foresti in French, Rachel McAdams in English), she meets her neighbor, the Aviator (André Dussollier in French, Jeff Bridges in English). Already an old man, he tells her about the story of the Little Prince (Andrea Santamaria, Riley Osborne) and so changes her ideas about her life.

The whole new narrative fundamentally changes the focus of the story. Saint-Exupéry primarily wrote autobiographical novels about wars and the lives of pilots, and, although “The Little Prince” is aimed at children, it contains many of his deepest thoughts on life. For instance, the Little Prince’s love for his rose, the core of the book, has to do with jealousy, attachment, loss, and trust, and it is as nuanced and sophisticated as any great love story. The film adaptation, however, completely ignores the novel’s sophistication. The relationship between the little prince and his rose is glossed over in literally less than a minute, and all the content in the book takes up around 30 minutes of the film. The rest of the movie focuses on the girl’s relationship with her mother, a decision clearly made for its targeted North American family audience. The complex themes are pared down to a simple child versus grown-up binary, where all grown-ups are emotionless working machines and children are naïve angels. The delicate melancholy throughout the original work vanishes and gives way to a sweetened comedy.

Although the themes are largely simplified, this added story still makes the narrative rather messy. Many important lines in the novel are stuffed in with little context, and the film frequently hurries through its plot without enough rest. Characters’ emotional transitions are swift and disjointed. Most importantly, though, the director shifts back and forth between the story of the girl and the story of the Little Prince, and he does not integrate these two threads particularly well.

That said, the film’s beautiful visual effects partly compensate for the problems with its story: The animation is nothing short of stunning. In a shot where clouds are presented as pieces of yellow cardboard surrounding the Little Prince, the animation is so gorgeous that even the pickiest audience might temporarily forgive the messy and over-simplified screenplay.

In “The Little Prince,” Mark Osborne essentially takes out all that makes Saint-Exupéry;s novel a classic and turns it into just another Hollywood family animation. While this may result in greater commercial success, it will likely let down fans of Saint-Exupery’s book.