Review of The Little Prince (2015) by Tori H — 19 Aug 2016

My review of the ersatz The Little Prince now streaming on Netflix. Contains restrained spoilers, and ire.

I knew that this version features a little girl learning about the story from an old Aviator. Okay, I thought, this might work. Perhaps the filmmaker adopted the kind of framing device like William Goldman used in The Princess Bride to let a different audience into a fantastic story. The setup got to the point, even if it ran long and hammered the daylights out of the idea that kids today are pressured to succeed. And it is offensive to me that one of the markers of the little girl's oppression was a big book of math problems - how many times do we need to fight the battle that girls doing math is not a punishment in and of itself? If the little girl loved engineering and tinkering, so many interesting things could have happened in new story. And if that old man was really an aviator who repaired his plane in the desert, he would have known a lot more about how his plane worked; I'm just sayin'. This leads down a path of ideas that I'm sure the filmmaker didn't intend to present, and certainly didn't pursue.

The film finally got to the story of the Little Prince, in some beautifully rendered stop-motion paper animation. But that section truncated and jammed in a lot of the book, slightly distorting the original themes in order to have them serve the plotting of the framing device. We got a fairly faithful treatment of the Little Prince and the Fox taming each other, and the encounter with the many roses in the garden. Then it was gone. And it all went downhill from there. The framing story deteriorated further, taking over the film and becoming some weird ride, almost literally, with the little girl flying the finally restored plane and meeting characters from the original story in a ridiculously concocted set of plot twists. I could practically see the filmmaker anticipating the theme park ride he wanted to license. And we never saw the stop-motion story continue. There were some more bits of the original story in a sort of flashback. I won't give you the spoiler as to why this happens, but it's the worst adulteration yet of the original in service to the new story. The singing well scene was presented in the computer animated style, destroying the delineation between the two worlds once and for all, and for no good reason.

And then we're left to wonder if the wild ride was all sort of a dream. If the little girl really fell from a substantial height off a broken drainpipe and was unconscious, why don't we see any injuries at all, and an energetic girl brushing her teeth the next morning with no further information to the audience? I know it's animation, but that strains credulity if it's supposed to be real. And if it didn't really happen, why does the mother see the drainpipe pulled away from the house and pitched over the fence into the old man's yard? The filmmaker perhaps thought he was leaving a charming ambiguity, but he was demonstrating that he wasn't in touch with either fantasy or reality, and would rather cheat with cheap devices than engage in genuine world-building.

And don't get me started about the cheesy epilogue. Or the hackneyed presentation of the missing dad. Or several other bad choices in plot and theme. This film had all the slick production of a Pixar film, while missing the attention to story and the genuine heart that the best of those films have to offer.

I watched the film until the end, but I was practically angry by the time the credits rolled. What a waste this film turned out to be. Take the best computer animators and techniques available, add a team of amazing and gifted traditional stop-motion animators, ensure you have a high-powered and talented Hollywood cast to do the voices, get permission [?] to alter a beloved piece of literature, and throw the entire project in the garbage can because the filmmaker fundamentally misunderstands the original story and has simplistic, wrongheaded ideas about how to condemn conformist culture.