Flick picks: ‘The Little Prince’ enchants all over again

Flick picks: ‘The Little Prince’ enchants all over again

The beloved French fable “The Little Prince” gets imaginatively expanded for the screen into a modern allegory about growing up, letting go, and nurturing your inner child.

This version, like the book, starts with a young boy trying to draw a picture of a boa constrictor eating an elephant, but the only thing adults can see is a hat. He grows up to be a pilot who crashes his plane in the Sahara Desert and meets a Little Prince (Riley Osborne).

The visitor hails from a small asteroid, where he lives alone with a rose, and regales the aviator with tales from his adventures visiting other tiny planets and their ridiculous residents, including a Conceited Man (Ricky Gervais) who thrives on applause; a King (Bud Cort) with no subjects; and a Businessman (Albert Brooks) who’s buying up all the stars. On Earth the Little Prince has tamed and befriended a Fox (James Franco).

The movie version, though, focuses on a Little Girl (Mackenzie Foy) whose Mother (Rachel McAdams) is so determined to get her daughter into the elite Werth Academy that she moves them into the school district and designs an exacting schedule of preparation to keep the Little Girl busy during the summer while she’s at work. Nextdoor in a crumbling manor lives an eccentric old man with a verdant backyard and a broken-down airplane: the Aviator (Jeff Bridges). His loose pages illustrating “The Little Prince” distract the Little Girl from her studies and introduce her to the power of imagination and the perpetuity of true friendship.

Director Mark Osborne (“Kung Fu Panda”) combines the most sophisticated CGI (for the scenes about the Little Girl) with exquisite stop-motion paper-mâché (for the sections with the Little Prince) in this enchanting animated masterwork inspired by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's novella. The precise compositions of the Little Girl’s home life with her busy-nesswoman Mom give way to heaps of fancy at the Aviator’s and in his story, where the marvelous art direction includes the delightfully designed Fox whose tail fans like the Little Prince’s scarf. That the tape holding together the Aviator’s torn pages appears on the sand dunes in his story is especially wowing.

إبراهيم زكاغ

مدون وأحب القراءة وكل جديد التكنولوجيا والإنترنت . إنشاء فولفولي جاء من الرغبة في مشاركة تجربتي المتواضعة ولأكون مساهما ولو بالقليل في محتوى الإنترنت.

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