Watched the new film version of the classic book The Little Prince on Netflix. This was going to be a theatrical release but the studio backed out in the US and Netflix picked it up. I think it got a theatrical release overseas.
The Little Prince is a weird philosophical French novel about a Little Prince who lives on a planet only slightly bigger than himself who falls in love with a rose and then leaves her because of reasons. He travels to other small worlds populated by weird adults and finally lands in the Sahara where he meets the book’s narrator, a pilot who crashed his biplane there.
The film version is about a single mom and her little girl. They are trying to get her into an austere prep school so Mom has planned out her daughter’s life from the minute to the year. There’s a weird old man with a broken down biplane in the house next door and the little girl and he strike up a friendship. He is the pilot who met the Little Prince when he was a young man and he retells the story of the book as part of this interesting frame story.
I really enjoyed this interpretation of the story and liked the frame story even more than the story of the Little Prince. That is, until I didn’t like it. The movie takes a weird right turn in the third act and gets a little too literal while going off on its flights of fancy. It’s like they realized they didn’t have enough action sequences and stuffed some in. I’d say this absolutely ruined the movie except the writing is somehow too smart for that. All the action set pieces, while seeming unnecessary, resolve in a good conclusion – the bad stuff was necessary to tell the good stuff. Still, it’d have been a better movie without all the hubub.
The film is a mix of standard (beautiful) CGI and other animation styles that look like paper cutouts. The voice cast is great – Jeff Bridges plays the old neighbor and his performance brought tears to my eyes at some points. Rachel McAdams, Paul Rudd, Benicio del Toro, Ricky Gervaise, Albert Brooks, Paul Giamatti, and James Franco all lend their voices as well.
This is a really sweet, really charming, and really heartfelt movie for kids and adults for at least 75% of the run-time. If only they had the courage to not go for the Hollywood third act, it’d have been great. Instead, it’s good. Worth watching. It doesn’t hurt you don’t have to pay extra if you already have Netflix… and <sarcasm> it’s at LEAST as good as the original Adam Sandler movies they are putting out </sarcasm>.
Score: 81