The idea of watching The Little Prince felt like a weird but welcomed trip back to French class. I felt like the film was fairly hyped by Netflix (or at least by my Netflix account) but I never got around to watching it. So, last night at 3 in the morning, I thought what better time than the present!
I felt that there was a smart structure to most of the film. We go along with the Aviator (Jeff Bridges) telling the Little Prince’s story to the unnamed Little Girl (Makenzie Foy). I felt like the incorporation of the Little Girl’s story with her busy and extremely “grown-up” mother (Rachel McAdams) was a great pairing to the Aviator’s story, complimenting the nature of the Little Prince and the idea that “growing up isn’t the problem, forgetting is.”
Another great pairing is that of the styles of animation. The stop motion used to handle the book’s narration is charming and simplistic, just like the character of the book itself. The beauty in the almost cellophane-like texture to the fox’s tail is just a small example of how it made those parts of the movie feel like a magical animated storybook.
I felt like the film was amazing up until the point of the Aviator’s time in the hospital. When the Little Girl runs away with his plane and finds the real Little Prince, now Mr. Prince (Paul Rudd) on a new planet of skyscrapers, suddenly we were in a different story. I continued to think that this was a dream sequence of some sort, which ultimately proved false. While it was cool to see her have her own adventure similar to the style of the Aviator’s, there was something forced about it that felt equivalent to why people get upset when new material is added to their favorite book’s movie adaptation: while the balance of the Little Girl’s story worked for the purpose of a film, it started to feel like they were trying to improve upon the book.
The thing with the Little Girl’s solo (with stuffed fox) journey was that it felt like the point was to show her (or us as the audience?) that the Aviator’s stories of the Little Prince were real. But “it is only with heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Why did we need to see any of this? Why make it take up such a significant portion of the movie’s close? I think if the idea was to show there was truth to the stories, a smaller and more powerful cameo could have been made to keep in line with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s simplistic style.
If the idea was to show that even the Little Prince himself was susceptible to growing up, well then I suppose I appreciate the sentiment, but not so much the execution.
What I really wanted to see was some sort of Little Prince magic worked on the mother. The scene with her and her daughter looking through the telescope was something like that, but just not nearly enough for me. There was a missed plotline in not allowing for the mother, overworked and overstressed, to discover the same lessons as her daughter. I think that a more poignant message would have shown, one appealing to any “adult” viewers who might have seen some of themselves in her character.
So overall, I felt like this movie was imaginative, touching, but needed to focus on the mom in a way that didn’t make her appear to be only a supporting character.
Aaaand the stuffed fox was super cute. I need to get me one of those.
