Review of A Little Princess (1995) by Eliana S — 09 Oct 2009

Fantasy is the key to having a great childhood. It seperates the younger ones away from the world they live in, and takes them to another world full of pure magic. With this magic, it can be any place a child has dreamed of going.

And the best part of it is, they can be there any time they want to. All they have to do is believe in what they see, and that miracle world they want will be there right infront of their eyes. After laying my eyes on A Little Princess, I felt a spark of that magic.

It gave me this warm feeling inside bringing back my childhood memoires of going on adventures like this. The movie is set in 1914, towards the beginning of WWI. Its focus is on a little girl named Sara Crewe.

Sara is a girl who is all about imagination. She mainly gets this inspiration from her father, who is portrayed as one of the greatest father everyone wishes they could have. He tells her about all these stories that are almost believable to actually happen.

Sadly, this happiness will not last long as her father has to go to war, and she having to be shipped to a New York boarding school. This school, however, is for parents who tend to want their children to act more grown up.

They believe that fantasy is just plain non-sense and would not get their children anywhere unless they have a little grown up sense in them. Sara does not believe in such a thing. She looks at the lives of the girls around her, and she simply just tells these stories as her father would tell her.

She tends to be quite skilled at telling such stories. She already knows the location of this world with the correct characters in it. She tells them as if she's read a novel a thousand times...but it all comes from her mind.

How does that happen? I was quite amazed to see that. That is how she gets the heart and soul of these poor females that surround her. She takes one look at them realizing they are not happy with where they are.

Luckily, she knows the perfect cure. And that is just by telling a story that gives these girls hope. Its what keeps them running, and keeps their spirits high. Unfortunatly, they are often blocked by the head of the school, Miss Michnin.

Michnin is like the parents who enrolled their children there. She is one who does not have a sense of fantasy, belieivng each girl should act in a civilized rich way. Later in the film, as Sara has lived in this boarding school for quite sometime, Michnin makes a discovery belieivng that Sara's father is presumed dead from the war, leaving no money behind to pay for her to stay.

As a result, Sara has been turned into a servant worker. That is still not going to stop Sara from giving these girls a huge slice of happiness. She just has to keep believing in the magic in order to keep things running great.

If she continues this, maybe a miracle or something great just might happen. That is what I liked about this movie. It tries to help us go back to our childhood memories, believing that anything is possible.

And you know what? That is not a bad thing to believe in at all. A fantastic gem of getting us to know that no matter where we are, no matter who we are, and no matter how old we are...we will always be a prince or a princess.