The Little Prince Voices of Mackenzie Foy, Jeff Bridges, Riley Osborne. Directed by Mark Osborne. Rated PG. Available August 5 on Netflix.
Just a week before it was set for release in U.S. theaters this past March, the animated movie The Little Prince was dropped by its American distributor, Paramount, without explanation, leaving the movie that had made nearly $100 million overseas in sudden limbo. Netflix quickly picked up the distribution rights and is premiering the movie for its subscribers, but it won’t be in theaters outside of a brief, extremely limited awards-qualifying run in a handful of cities. That’s a shame, because whatever its narrative flaws, director Mark Osborne’s film looks gorgeous, and would be best appreciated on the big screen.
It’s an adaptation of French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s beloved 1943 children’s book, but Saint-Exupéry’s story actually forms only a small portion of the movie, which Osborne and screenwriters Irena Brignull and Bob Persichetti have fleshed out with an extensive framing story set in the present day. The book is a dreamlike fable inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s experiences as a pilot, in which the unnamed narrator crash-lands his plane in the desert and meets the title character, a young boy who claims to have traveled from a tiny far-off planet, on which he is the only inhabitant.
It’s not enough to fill a feature film, but Osborne’s movie spends surprisingly little time on the prince and his adventures. For the first 20 minutes, the prince doesn’t appear at all, and the movie focuses on an eight-year-old girl (voiced by Mackenzie Foy)—none of the characters have names—who’s moved to a new neighborhood so she can go to a fancy prep school chosen by her workaholic mother (Rachel McAdams). Although literally her entire life is mapped out to maximize academic achievement, she finds herself sidetracked by her oddball neighbor (Jeff Bridges), an eccentric old man with a house full of trinkets.
It turns out that he’s the older version of the narrator in Saint-Exupéry’s novel, and he starts telling the little girl the story of the Little Prince (Riley Osborne, son of the director). While the main narrative is depicted in a familiar modern CG animation style (Osborne was the co-director of the first Kung Fu Panda), the segments featuring the events from the book are created with stunning stop-motion animation, strikingly setting them apart from the majority of mainstream animated movies.
The surreal, impressionistic nature of the Little Prince’s story is sometimes at odds with the more grounded, straightforward modern-day narrative, which teaches lessons about following your dreams and never giving up, recognizable from dozens of other contemporary family movies. Both parts of the movie work well, but they don’t always work well together, especially in the final act when the little girl must rescue the grown-up version of the Little Prince, and the movie turns him into a Peter Pan figure in a way that doesn’t properly connect with the parts of the story that are drawn directly from the book. At that point, Osborne risks turning his unique film into the kind of generic, crowd-pleasing animated movie that Paramount probably would have been happy to release in theaters. Its path to American audiences may have been rough, but keeping the artistic integrity of the story is what makes it worthwhile.
