Review of The Little Prince (2015) by Brandon W — 04 Aug 2016

The Little Prince is directed by Mark Osborne, and it stars Mackenzie Foy, Jeff Bridges, and Rachel McAdams in a stop-motion and computer animated film about a child that has a life goal that her mom created for the summer to learn about every subject for school, and while doing all that, she got distracted when a paper flew by to her, which was from the Aviator (Jeff Bridges), and the story was called The Little Prince, which is actually one of the most famous book in France.

The Little Girl (Mackenzie Foy) likes the story, wants to know more about it, and when she hangs out with him more, she starts to create a friendship with the Aviator. When I saw the trailer for it, I was ready to watch it in theaters when Paramount Pictures distributed it.

When it was close to be in the big screens, the US theatrical release was completely gone as Paramount Pictures took it down with no explanation. So when I start to lose a bit of hope on getting to watch it, Netflix got on hold of it and will release it not in theaters, but on Netflix instead.

So I finally got to see it, and I can say that it lived up to my high expectations. Mackenzie Foy is great in it, I'm glad to see her in more films. Jeff Bridges acts a bit different than your usual stuff from him in other films, and the other actors like James Franco, Marlon Cotillard, Benicio del Toro, Paul Giamatti, Albert Brooks, and Ricky Gervais are acting distinctive as I didn't know it was even them.

I like that even though it's mostly about the Little Girl, there's a connection with her story, and The Little Prince story, and when it gets to the story, the animation changes to stop-motion, and it's really cool.

The computer animation is also really good, and the characters are well rounded that you understand why the Mother is like that, what the Aviator is like, and actually care about the Little Girl while getting surprisingly not annoyed with her.

Like the Little Girl, you want to know more about The Little Prince too if you haven't read it, and I was interested in both the film's stories. The only aspect that I think that some viewers are going to deal with as a way to comprehend it, is the last 20 minutes of the film.

I'm not gonna spoil the ending, but I will say that the direction that it went with those last minutes are very weird, and you wouldn't even think it'll even go there. Some would like it, some would probably find it a bit off-putting and wouldn't like it.

It is necessary to be there? Probably as there is a brief explanation as to why it lead to that, and there might be some theories about it. Even it surprised me and I was trying to grasp it, but I did like where it was going, and it didn't felt out of place.

Fans of the source material would like the film as it showed enough of The Little Prince story itself. Whether they like the Little Girl's story is up to them, but for me, I think it's a beautiful film that doesn't treat kids dumb, and more or less gives in to the imagination of it with the heart and good humor that it'll interest both kids and adults.